Guest Spot: ICS @ Kalispell Regional Medical Center -- Using MEDITECH's Integrated Communication Services

Contributed by: Pat Korolog, Applications Specialist II, Kalispell Regional Medical Center

Kalispell Regional Medical Center is a 150 bed Acute Care and 110 bed LTC facility located in Northwest Montana. In 2001 we implemented Meditech’s ICS module – the Client Server version of MOX. The application is a very basic email system and does not include many bells and whistles. We rolled this out to our nursing, pharmacy and housekeeping staff. Any of our users that needed access to the scheduling features in Outlook or who needed to be able to email outside the organization remained in Outlook. We set it up so that users could email between ICS and our internal Outlook, our Outlook users could email our ICS users as well as internal and external Outlook users, but the ICS users could not email outside of our organization.

We had two primary goals for our ICS implementation:

1)Save money on MS Outlook licenses

a.MS Outlook Basic Software License now runs $30.00 per workstation

b.MS Outlook Client Access License now runs $56.00 per user

2)Simplify the nurse’s process to obtain email while increasing security

a.With MS Outlook the clinical user had to log off of the network and log back in with their personal network password. The clinicians had enough trouble remembering their Meditech password, much less a network password. They complained that it took too much time to log off the network and back on again. Even more concerning was that if they were logged onto the network and walked away from the workstation – anyone could view their email, personal folders, etc.

b.With Meditech’s ICS – as long as the PC was logged into the network the user need only log onto Meditech and click on the mailbox icon to work with their email.

We were the first C/S facility to bring up ICS and we felt the pains for several years that beta sites often feel. Although Meditech’s ICS Service team worked with us every step of the way, there were many nebulous issues that were extremely time-consuming to trouble-shoot. Our most troubling issue involved attachments not opening. It took almost two years to determine the cause of the problem. We thought it had to do with the fact that we migrated to WIN Terminal Services – but the issue had to do with the way in which the program handled files on the mail message packets as they moved in and out of ICS. The issue was resolved in 2004.

What Are We Waiting For?

Meditech has several issues in development that we have requested. Currently ICS does not exchange mail in HTML format so some of our messages lose their formatting. We have to educate users to send an attachment to maintain the formatting. Meditech is still working on a method to remove a user’s ename (ICS email address) from the directory if it is changed. Sometimes a user will switch from using ICS mail to using Outlook mail because they need the enhanced functionality. Their old ICS email address remains in ICS and the new Outlook email address also displays. Users are confused as to which email address to use. Meditech is also experiencing some indexing problems with these changes and users are unable to pull up their email without a Meditech programmer re-indexing the user.

Was It Worth It?

We currently have 589 Meditech users using ICS. Times that by $56.00 per user license and we have a user software license savings of $32,984.00. We have 205 workstations that would need a Client Access License at $30.00 per workstation which comes to $6,150.00. Our total savings in cost for licenses is $39,134.00.

I don’t know how to weigh that against the CIS time spent trouble-shooting some of the initial issues, but at this time the product has grown considerably and we spend very little time maintaining this module. I think the Meditech ICS team that we work with, Amy Bono and Sean Rabbit, have done a phenomenal job of responding to issues that were as time-consuming to them as they were to us. I’m looking forward to working with this product as they roll out future enhancements which, hopefully, will include the ability to build system wide distribution groups in ICS.