Business Continuity Tips, Tricks, and Use Cases for Adding Value to your Summit Downtime Reporting System

By: BJ Rosario, Product Manager 

The Summit Downtime Reporting System (DRS) is a powerful business continuity tool for healthcare, providing clinical staff access to patient reports during planned and unplanned downtimes.

But are you leveraging all that Summit DRS has to offer?

Just as your healthcare organization is rapidly growing, your business continuity solution should also scale to meet the increasing needs of your clinical staff. Don’t fall into the trap of letting your downtime solution be a “set it and forget it” piece of software!

Need ideas on how you can add value to your current setup of Summit DRS today? Here are a few pieces of product functionality and use cases that you may not be aware of:

1. Distribute reports not from your EHR

When you think of a downtime, you might be only thinking about the standard reporting modules out of your electronic health record system: medication administration records, dietary lists, allergy lists, alpha censuses, schedules, etc. Perhaps you are even using the Summit Scripting Toolkit (SST) to extract this patient data out of your EHR.

But what about all the other vendor software in your workflow? Would your clinical staff benefit from accessing reports from these vendors during a downtime too?

Let Summit software help you! Summit SST and its newly enhanced optical character read functionality (OCR+) can help you non-invasively extract the data you want, even from a Citrix environment. From there, Summit Scheduler can assist with automation, picking up reports from network directories to incorporate into your downtime reporting workflow.

Any .PDF file is supported by Summit DRS. If your report can be scheduled out of your vendor’s software as a .PDF, then Scheduler can take care of the rest.

2. Distribute static reports

Patient data isn’t the only thing that can be distributed during a downtime. Consider optimizing your workflow by providing access to static files, such as pre-made forms that your clinical staff can print and fill out during a downtime. If you have specific instructions and workarounds as part of your downtime procedures, try incorporating a static read-me file that is available alongside patient reports at all your designated workstations.

The more creative you are with what you can distribute, the more you can empower your clinical staff to use the solution and overcome the stigma of uncertainty that downtimes create.

3. Customize user access

Who has access to patient reports? Are you using the right structure to ensure the highest level of HIPAA compliance and patient data security?

Summit DRS’s robust user management capabilities were designed with enterprise-level security in mind, allowing you to customize user permissions to meet your security needs. Consider restricting reports so that only users in a specific Active Directory group have access to specific departmental reports.

Take the time to get creative with your AD group organization, thus maximizing the degree of security and automation in your user management processes.

4. Do more with programming

Do you have a skilled technical programmer on staff? Leverage their expertise in VBScript and application programming to take Summit Scheduler’s capabilities to the next level.

By using the “Run Application” action in Scheduler, you can launch .BAT and .EXE files to run more advanced logic in your workflow. Scheduler also supports command line arguments, making your custom code even more robust and reusable in meeting your file management needs.

5. Print only what you need

Are you printing all your reports prior to a planned downtime? Did you know that you don’t have to?

Stop printing thousands of pages of MAR reports, only to have 80% of the stack untouched and sent straight to the PHI shredder when the shift ends. Help your end users save time, frustration, ink, and paper by having them log into DRS with their AD credentials to view and print reports on demand.

Print jobs and report views are fully audited at all workstations, so that your application administrator will always know who printed what report, where, and when.

6. Get consultative help from Summit on your downtime strategy

Maybe it’s been a few years since your first implementation of DRS and now you have new staff members who will be managing the software. Summit Healthcare offers personalized refresher sessions by our Implementation and Training Team, as well as free bi-weekly office hours that you can sign up for through our online Support site.

Or, better yet, let Summit be your new engineer! Summit now offers engineering Outsourcing Services for DRS. We’ll help you scale your existing solution, optimize performance in report scheduling and delivery, and work with your team to prepare for your next planned EHR downtime.

For more details on this new service opportunity, please contact Summit Support or your Summit Account Manager.

Cheers.