UC Davis raises IT productivity bar with InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration, development platform

InterSystems Corporation, the global leader in software for connected health care, today announced that the IT productivity bar has been raised by the University of California Davis Health System with its rollout of the InterSystems Ensemble^® rapid integration and development platform. The announcement highlighting the UC Davis achievements came during the HIMSS11 conference.

InterSystems specializes in advanced integration, database, and business intelligence technologies for breakthrough applications. The enterprise-wide integration initiative was kicked off at the UC Davis Medical Center, which provides care to more than 200,000 patients annually and has an annual budget of $1.5 billion.

Improved Control, Increased Reliability, Reduced Error Rates

"Epic Systems' EpicCare is our system of record for some, but not all, of our clinical data; information is constantly fed into, and transmitted from, our Epic EHR," said David Green, Manager of Systems Integration at UC Davis.

"Our IT environment is highly complex with components of patient information residing in multiple applications," Green explained. "Rather than having a single point-to-point interface able to populate a target system with a complete set of information, a target application at UC Davis often requires data from multiple systems to satisfy business requirements," he said.

"Unlike other integration engines that are limited to the APIs that are provided by the system of record, Ensemble has made it possible to build non-traditional interfaces that enable retrieving data at points that were previously difficult to access.

"If, for example, information is being sent from System A to System B and the Epic system has some additional data related to what's being transmitted between the systems, we can use Ensemble to enhance the data streaming between System A and System B with relevant data from Epic," Green said.

As a result, the quality of information being presented to clinicians is significantly improved as they receive data that was previously unavailable. Developers at UC Davis have also built interfaces that make it possible to query applications and, based on the response, transfer it more effectively. "We had a business requirement to get the Level of Service code from our third-party billing system into Epic. That billing system does not always know the specific Epic contact so we use a Web services query from Ensemble to determine the correct contact on which to place the code before posting the HL7 message through the interface," Green explained.

"Ensemble gives us control at a more granular level and makes it easier to use Web services so we can query applications at whatever point is appropriate to fulfill our requirements," he continued. "We've substantially increased the quality of our data and reduced our error logs because more complete information is being posted to the right spot."

Improved Developer Productivity Cuts Costs

The combination of Ensemble and Web services results in interfaces that are easy to maintain, modify and enhance with new functionality, according to Green. "The end result is a very small amount of extendable, clean code that is easy to support and a huge productivity payoff. The alternative would have involved paying developers to build code bridges between applications, which would have been a major, expensive challenge," he said.

"The bottom line is that Ensemble enables us to combine data from multiple sources in one connection within a single, event-driven message. This reduces programming effort and often cuts interface testing scope in half," Green concluded.

"By leveraging Ensemble capabilities and Web services with a creative interface development strategy, UC Davis has devised a means of increasing application reliability while simultaneously improving programmer productivity," said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems Vice President of Strategic Planning. "We are very pleased to provide the technology that enables this breakthrough."

Source: InterSystems