Like all healthcare facilities, South County Hospital (SCH) wanted to make sure its back office – where the business aspects of the hospital are taken care of – was as up-to-date and efficient as its clinical departments.

So, the Wakefield, Rhode Island-based hospital decided to automate many repetitive manual tasks, such as “producing daily reports for various departments throughout the hospital, preparing downtime reports in case of a system failure, and ensuring the accurate transfer of online payments made on the hospital’s Web site onto MEDITECH, its medical information technology system,” according to a story by Gary Croteau at bnet, the CBS interactive business network.

SCH is an independent, non-profit, 100-bed acute care hospital, which provides a comprehensive range of advanced inpatient, outpatient and home health services, according to the story.

Wakefield, Rhode Island-based SCH found that automating its workflow gave managers easy online access to payroll and expense reports, and eliminated many of the problems that can accompany the paper process, according to Croteau, who is assistant vice president and chief information officer at the hospital.

When SCH purchased its MEDITECH system, Croteau says, he and his IS team “realized that one major component missing from the health information system (HIS) was the ability to put reports into production.” At the time, the IS staff managing it manually, “which was time- consuming for the IS resource side and the demands of teaching and assisting staff to run reports were not efficient.”

Medical Information Technology, Inc., or MEDITECH, is a Massachusetts-based software and service company selling information systems that automate workflow for health care organizations throughout the world, according to wikipedia.org.

Croteau and his colleagues decided that scripting tools might be the answer and that Boston WorkStation, (BWS) a task automation software developed by Boston Software Systems, might be the solution, according to the story. “The software allows IT departments to develop, test and run scripts that simplify processes across the hospital,” Croteau writes. “It automates regular, repetitive, time-intensive tasks, data updates or uploads that are done manually, and ensures the accurate flow of information.”

According to Boston Software Systems’ Web site, “Many hospitals use BWS's scripting tool to integrate test devices to results reporting systems, connect to the internet for real time eligibility checking, complete data and conversions migrations, and automate remittance posting.”

“Our users are not IT people, and they don’t necessarily need to learn the technical process of generating and accessing a report,” Croteau writes. “They simply need to quickly obtain the information they are looking for. We felt the best way to handle this was to generate these reports through automation with Boston WorkStation and maximize the use of our Intranet as a distribution mechanism for our users.”

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