Take the Nightmare Out of Integration!

7 Centers of Excellence of Maintaining Your Interface Engine
When it comes to interface engines there are 7 Centers of Excellence that will tell you quickly if you have a nightmare on your hands. These 7 items can make a world of difference and yet, they are so simple that they are easily missed.

1. Naming conventions of interfaces
2. Standardize programming structure of your engine
3. Required documentation of programming and modifications
4. Testing environments including the interface engine and applications
5. Testing requirements including documentation and sign offs
6. Synchronization between the test engines and productions
   • This can go either way. Most likely you have test to production covered. However, admit it, you made a change quickly in production. Did it get put back into the test environment?
7. Change control
   

Creating an Environment of Collaboration

It is not enough to focus on the interface engine. You must also create an environment of collaboration in order to minimize your nightmare.  Even if you have only one person working on interfaces this can still be an issue because most likely you have another individual who supports the interfaces when they are out. Most interface engineers that I have worked with are introverted geniuses. They can usually make interface engines do things that no one ever thinks of; however, many like to keep their “cards close to their chest”. 

In most cases, it is always best to relate a problem in ways that will benefit the individual. Here are some ways that collaboration will benefit the individual:

• When each individual is out, it will help the team cover for them. This means less calls to them on their days off.
• We need to work smarter not harder. If we are sharing ideas and solutions, we all benefit.
• We must have consensus on the common factors and each individual is executing them across the board. It should not be a free for all and everyone doing his/her own thing. This will decrease the analysis time when something goes wrong because everyone is on the same page.
• Naming conventions
• Common store procedure are used by everyone. E.g. filter patient by outpatient location by passing department codes as parameters. There is no need for multiple procedures to do this.
• Time Out/Alerts Management. Who gets notified when an interface gets hung up?
• Etc.
• Don’t become so rigid or controlling of the environment that easy fixes become hours’ worth of work.
• In weekly meetings, each team member reports what they are working on and its progress. No one has to second guess what the other team member are working on. If a team member is stuck on a project, others can help.

It is human nature to adhere to what we know. When an engineer learns a system, it is only natural that they develop all the interfaces for that system. There are times that this approach does make sense especially if it is a new system being implemented. However, I would like to challenge you on this. The downside to this is that only one person learns it. Try to break up the assignments across your engineers so that more than one person is learning that application. This will create an environment of cross training and sharing of information once they can break through the silo barriers. It will force them to work together as a team.
If you are a manager, it is sometime difficult to make a culture shift in your group. In the short term, this requires people to slow down and re-think what they are doing. Again, it is human nature to become creature of habits. Breaking those habits is not always easy and there could be some complaining. However, keep the goals constantly in front of your staff including why they are doing it and how it is to benefits them. Show monthly progress towards 100% compliance and celebrate when you do hit the 100% mark. Be strategic in your planning, it will benefit you, your team, the department, and the organization, plus it will help take the nightmare out of integration!

About Us
In today's culture, it is not enough to be the typical consulting/service firm. There are dozens of organizations that can tell you what you already know or place a body in a chair. What every CIO and Director strives for in an outside firm is benefit joined together with partnership. D288 IT Solution is a consulting/service firm that focuses on integration, IT management reports, database administration, and SQL reporting. We offer consulting and longer term outsourcing services. 
D288 IT Solutions is based out of Syracuse, NY and our workforce is all based solely in the United States. Our technicians offer our clients expertise in their perspective technology. However, that is not enough, the technician must understand the process driving the technology. We only hire technicians that have hospital experience. The combination of expertise and hospital experience is one of the benefits we bring to the table.