Southern Illinois Healthcare, Carbondale, IL

April 20, 2015: Jeffery Boomer, RN Senior Clinical Systems Analyst, PCS, BMV, OE, POM, DrFirst, MDI

Jeffery Boomer and other staff at Southern Illinois Healthcare Services installed and began using SyncSolve in March, 2015. Since installation and training Jeffery says “It’s been really good. We’ve had to tweak our processes to avoid some problems identified using the application. For example, when we ran a comparison on NUR interventions, it revealed discrepancies that were introduced from other vendor content. Not even the other vendor knew there were discrepancies until the comparison had been run. We then went to the vendor and asked them to resolve the problems.

Also, when more than one analyst touches an application, we had trouble deciding if something should be synched or not. We decided to restrict analysts to specific applications to avoid more than one analyst touching the same application at the same time.” Jeffery considered these to be minor changes and workflow adaptations in learning how to use the product to their best advantage.

Jeffery admits that using the product has been a “big eye opener in making us aware of all the discrepancies out there. The Pharmacy is very happy that their strings can be moved by the SyncSolve application rather than having to be rebuilt manually. Those are very complicated. This is really the only product I have seen that takes the background work out of it.”

When asked if the SyncSolve application was more difficult to use or more work than anticipated, he responded, “It’s not more work than I anticipated, and it’s more comprehensive than I would have given it credit for. I made the assumption that this product would do what other products do, which is have you develop your own scripting and then perform the synchronization. We tried working with another product to help us keep the rings synched. Two of us tried to figure out how to script for Pharmacy and we couldn’t do it.” “This is not a pure scripting tool. It opens up the background and works with the information there. Without a tool such as this, you could easily have a FTE (full time equivalent) involved to keep the rings synched,” Jeffery says.

“I’ve seen many of the other products and I’ve never seen one that works without you having to do the scripting yourself. You can contract with the companies to do the scripting for you, but that is going to cost you more money.”

“One of the nicest features is the scheduled reports and being able to email them to yourself,” says Jeffery.“We have a top notch NPR report writer set up a report that pulls data from the MIS change logs. It’s nice to know when someone has been in the system and to know what someone changed, but the MIS reports are hard to read because of the lack of formatting and the report does not compare rings.”

“We are getting ready to implement another HCIS in the LIVE environment. The HCIS will have a LIVE ring and a training ring, and the current TEST ring will be exclusively used for our development projects. Our analysts can go in and develop what they need to in the TEST ring without impacting the TRAINING ring”

“Before I realized SyncSolve’s potential, there was absolutely no time to manage dictionaries or to accomplish the goal of implementing another HCIS ring for this purpose. It just was not going to be possible. MEDITECH will copy LIVE and create another HCIS for our TRAINING system, and the current TEST ring will need to be manually synced. We’ve already started doing this with the help of SyncSolve.

“I can’t speak to what support will be like out of BETA, but I don’t think I could ask for anything more while in BETA. Jim Smith (SyncSolve Product Director) is very responsive and if he doesn’t know how to do something he will figure it out.”

Jeffery confesses, “I was one of those people that thought SyncSolve was a waste of time. I wasn’t going to give the product the time of day. I put the sales team off for a long time, but when I saw the very first demo I knew it was different than the others. You owe it to yourself to at least see the demo. Get your best scriptwriter to see the demo with you so they can tell you just how much easier it is. That FTE is very expensive and one FTE would not be enough to cover a lot of other larger hospitals.”