We have a saying here at Mach7: “Every customer is different.” By this, we mean that you can have two very similar customers in terms of number of facilities, number of procedures per year, number of patients served, etc. that have completely different workflows and challenges. For this reason, a pure “one-size-fits-all” approach tends to be infeasible or even downright impossible. A healthcare IT solution must be flexible and easily adaptable to meet any customer’s complex needs. Fortunately, the Mach7 Platform was designed with this in mind and allows for custom adapters to be created and implemented without upgrading or downtime.
Last week, we posted about a 1-million-study-per-year customer with 11 hospitals, several clinics and outpatient centers, using our platform to replace their Radiology PACS and Cardiology PACS. This same customer is also using our platform to solve workflow issues for small sites that fall outside their enterprise EHR, like procedure ordering and distributing diagnostic reports. Almost all of the customer’s facilities use the Epic EHR to handle those tasks, however the outliers, which are smaller, more peripheral sites, don’t have Epic for various reasons like costs or the time and resource investment to implement and configure the system. Not having an EHR makes distributing diagnostic reports especially difficult.
In case you missed it, this customer came to us to replace their aging radiology PACS, which was integrated with a RIS that was being phased out simultaneously. Other than its usual functions, the RIS was providing this customer’s peripheral sites with the ability to fax diagnostic reports to physicians. Faxing is a historical model that has been largely replaced in the last decade by EHRs. Removing the RIS would create a gap in this functionality for these sites, and at the time the customer contracted with us, the Mach7 Platform did not have the ability to provide it. Fortunately, thanks to our platform’s flexible architecture, we were able to easily develop a solution to solve their problem.
With the gap identified, Mach7’s engineers quickly went to work building an adapter that would seamlessly take over faxing functionality from the RIS. As mentioned, this adapter’s primary purpose would be to use faxing to distribute diagnostic reports to referring physicians at this customer’s peripheral sites. In less than a month, the fully-functional adapter was built, tested, and added to the Mach7 Platform install for this customer, closing the gap and maintaining their workflow.
This is just one example of the many custom adapters we’ve created and workflow’s we’ve enabled to allow our customers to meet their unique needs. Do you have a complex use case you need addressed? Reach out to us and we can help! Contact us to join the conversation today!