Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. provides practice management and electronic health record (EHR) technology to physician practices, hospitals, and other healthcare providers. Allscripts also provides solutions for patient engagement and care coordination, as well as financial and analytics technology. With more than 180,000 physician users, 2,700 hospitals and 13,000 extended care organizations, Allscripts is a leading medical technology provider.
The Challenge
Allscripts’ back-office application for enriching data and processing transactions from EHRs and sending healthcare records to pharmacies, healthcare partners and other consumers relied on ASP scripts and custom code to validate and enrich rules and BizTalk for processing transactions. These factors all contributed to extensive maintenance effort for developers. Additional obstacles plagued the system, including an inability to interact with multiple databases and challenges enriching the data at the rate and level required to keep up with the flow of Allscripts’ business. With a desire to improve these issues, Allscripts initiated a project to modernize its back-office application.
Project Overview
Allscripts wanted to allow non-technical users to author business rules with little or no involvement by the development team. Additionally, Allscripts required a standalone platform that would provide the necessary framework to interact with different databases and support various language-related components. Finally, the organization needed a cloud-based solution that would be interoperable between Allscripts EHRs and external partners.
Solution
The result of this initiative is the Hub, Allscripts’ modern, scalable back-office application. Within the Hub, Allscripts deployed InRule for data validation and enrichment of missing customer data fields. Decision makers selected InRule’s decision platform for its ability to allow business users to write and manage the business rules that run its transaction processing system.
Within the Hub application, Allscripts built out a transaction processing solution that runs in the cloud and calls out to multiple databases at once searching for medical data. The system then sends hundreds of messages to Allscripts EHRs and external partners. Since the solution is in the cloud and connects to multiple databases and external partners, the solution can now send multiple types of different messages.
In addition, since InRule can call out to multiple databases and products independently, the application can translate, validate and enrich data and messages faster than before. The new solution also alleviates the need to use ASP scripts to validate and enrich rules and the requirement for BizTalk to process transactions. InRule allows Allscripts to execute rules faster and deliver messages on time to EHRs and external partners.
Results
Allscripts’ has fully embraced the Hub and the functionality delivered by InRule. The solution now houses roughly 560 custom rule applications throughout four rule applications, all of which were created – and continue to be managed – by only eleven business users. In total, the Hub processes about one million transactions each day and Allscripts can now send approximately 70 messages per second between its EHRs and external partners.
The solution now operates faster and with less IT support than before. Allscripts is now no longer reliant on ASP and custom code for business rules or BizTalk for processing transactions. With InRule, the team can author business rules, deploy them on-demand and execute them all from within the decision platform. In fact, each rule execution takes about 1000 milliseconds. Finally, Allscripts can now validate and enrich its data across multiple databases, providing more accurate messaging throughout the partner network.
Next Steps
The launch of the Hub has been a great success for Allscripts and the deployment of InRule has provided improved and measurable results for the business. According to an Allscripts’ product manager, “InRule is an excellent product and can be used to deploy rules quickly.” Given the value that InRule has provided within the Hub, the team plans to use InRule wherever possible in future projects that require decision automation.
