Interface in a day?

Have you ever had a seemingly impossible task presented to you? In what seems to be an impossible timeline? This is the story of time IPeople was presented with an interface challenge that was turned around in a day, yes, a day!

The IPeople team was able to write an inbound interface for an existing client in a single day from proposal to addendum signature to delivery.

The primary purpose of an integration of any kind is automation.

Ultimately saving the end user from overwhelming amounts of manually keying in hundreds or thousands of records; sometimes into multiple places to keep two different systems in sync. These interfaces can be for one-time use or ongoing processes.

In the instance of the one-time use interface, IPeople will scope and perform interfaces that are a one-time run to achieve a very specific task like synchronizing dictionaries between MEDITECH Test & Live rings to UNV security scripts. Thinking about it this way, interfaces can and often are, written for any and every application MEDITECH currently offers.  

One of our IPeople clients approached us about a project where they were consolidating a recent acquisition into their network and their MEDITECH Client Server 5.67 system.

The interface challenge was two-fold:

1. They needed to add all users from their new acquisition into the existing MEDITECH platform, and they needed to update all existing users to their new, consolidated domain - all while not affecting ongoing patient care.
2. They couldn't bring down the system to do it. While this process was being done, they needed the existing users to continue to be able to sign on from their old domain, until the new domain went live. 

The hospital had done their research and in checking the number of existing users who had active access to MEDITECH combined with the new users that would need to be added - there were THOUSANDS of users that were going to have to be modified. The hospital was faced with a challenge - do they manually do this, or look for some help?  They wisely chose to look for help.  Luckily we received the challenge.

As a test, we asked how long this process would take to do manually - for a single user. The UNV application is well written and straightforward to use. But even something as simple as adding a domain to an existing user, the results were staggering. Not even counting the time it took to log into the MEDITECH system, navigate to the UNV User menu, the hospital found that it would take over a full minute to check the consolidated spreadsheet they created and find the first user ID, type it into the UNV User screen, navigate to the UNV Security tab, check if the user already had the new domain needed, and if not - then add the user's NEW username and domain. One full minute. That doesn't sound too bad on the surface, now let's multiply that times, say, 5,000 users. That is a grand total of 300,000 seconds, 5,000 hours, or 208 days. 208 days IF that person was superhuman and never slept, ate, or had to go to the bathroom. 

What kind of value does an automated interface bring to a hospital?

Many hospital systems simply do not have an extra person(s) to spare for the next 5,000 hours - but even if they did, what is the average cost for an employee? Let's take our most entry-level IT staff member, unfortunately, he or she was the unlucky individual to draw the short straw and is now being requested to add all these users to the system. Luckily for the hospital, since he or she is entry-level, they are also the most affordable. BLS.gov states an average of all computer-related professionals at $43.87 an hour, so let's round down and call it $43 per hour - if we take that number and simply multiply it by the estimated time to perform this task manually - you are looking at an astounding $215,000 in labor alone!

What did it cost the hospital to have IPeople automate this process?  $1,950.

IPeople is built for this. The second product the company wrote was a proprietary, built-for-MEDITECH, scripting solution to automate repetitive tasks solving exactly the problem like the hospital above. The hospital reached out to IPeople and after a 30-minute scoping call, our technical and sales teams had a scope of work written out and presented to the hospital. After a quick review (assuming the hospital had already done the math) the hospital signed off and we went to work. 

In this case, the stars did certainly align. This was a hospital that IPeople had previously done work for, so we had already established connectivity and had a server that was not currently at the capacity that could be used for this. In addition, an existing integration team member had just wrapped up a prior project - they were ready to begin immediately.

On the next business day, within the first 30 minutes, the integration team had IPeople Script installed on the identified server.

• By 2:00 PM CST, the initial logic for the interface had been developed.
• By 4:00 PM, the proof of concept and testing had been complete.
• By 5:00 PM the site had verified the first five accounts to be added to the new domain and less than two weeks later, all 5,000 user accounts had been set up and completed.

208 days reduced to 14 days

5,000 hours reduced to 333 hours

This is the power of the IPeople Script technology!

This is the story of one hospital finding great value in the automated interface.

This is the story how IPeople successfully developed an interface in 24 hours.

This is the story of a hospital saving their staff thousands of hours of manual entry.

This is the story of a hospital saving over $173,400.00 in the process.

IPeople would love for our next success story to be YOU.

Click the following link to set up an absolutely free 30-minute scoping session

to see how we can automate your next challenge.