Author: Javier Navarro, Lead Software Developer
Have you ever been waiting in a line at the hospital admissions area or in a doctor office? If you have, didn’t you have the feeling that you were asked for questions that you had answered many times before? With more and more data, more and more systems, and more and more government regulations, hospitals must share data between different doctors, different facilities, different areas in the hospital, and different computer programs. They also must report some of this data to the state health agencies for monitoring certain diseases such as COVID-19. Instead of manually entering the same data again and again, the “magic” solution consists in sharing all this data between all the different systems involved in the patient care by using an interface engine and by interchanging messages with the content to be shared.
Since I joined Summit Healthcare 8 years ago, I have been trying to explain to family and friends what I do at work, and this has been more or less my explanation.
My main goal is to develop an interface engine capable of sharing data based on the different hospital needs. This is not an easy task, because data has to be distributed to multiple systems with different formats and has to be available at the time the doctor needs it. Performance is a key factor because most of our customers process millions of messages per day, sometimes in different facilities and even in different time zones. To accommodate our solution to the hospital needs, we use the concept of deployments. A deployment is a group of interfaces logically related that run on an individual executable and are isolated from the rest of components. This concept allows us to run the same solution in a small hospital that may only needs one deployment and in bigger hospitals with multiple facilities that require multiple deployments on different servers. The Summit Exchange solution provides a user interface for monitoring all the different deployments as if they were running on a single computer.
After having failed with the explanation above many times, I came with the idea of the “hospital magician”. As a magician my role is to magically move the data from one computer to another in a complete automated way. My six year old daughter liked this explanation much more than the previous one. So, I will try to keep this in mind while building and extending our magic interface engine.
For more information on the Summit Exchange integration engine, visit our website: summit-healthcare.com/summit-exchange/
