Northwell Health is New York’s largest private employer and health care provider, with over 830 hospitals and care centers. They care for over two million people annually in the New York metro area and beyond with 76,000+ employees – 18,500+ nurses and 16,600+ credentialed physicians, including about 4,500 employed doctors and nearly 3,800 members of Northwell Health Physician Partners.
HealthShare Achievements
J2’s work at Northwell began when we were asked to write a formal reference architecture document for two strategic initiatives: replacing Northwell’s legacy eGate integration engine with Ensemble (now Health Connect) and implementing health information exchange with HealthShare. After the Northwell team signed off on the reference architecture and formalized its commitment to InterSystems technology, J2 began the implementation of our proposed solutions. Within six months, a joint team of J2 and Northwell resources completed the first phase of what would become the largest implementation of HealthShare to date. J2’s responsibilities have included:
- Installation, configuration, and deployment of the integration solution (Ensemble) and the HIE solution (HealthShare), including robust high availability and disaster recovery
- Development of canonical interface formats for ADT, MDM, ORM, ORU, and SIU message traffic
- Implementation of over 120 interfaces to both Ensemble and HealthShare, including ADT, MDM, ORM, ORU, and SIU
- Development and deployment of a customized HealthShare provider portal
- Implementation of an event notification framework for patient readmissions within 30 days of discharge
- Design and development of a custom auditing framework, including custom audit triggers and centralization of audit data within HealthShare
- Design and development of an online and offline message archive capability, including the ability to recover archived messages from offline to online storage
- Deployment of HealthShare Patient Index (HSPI), including tuning and initial data load of over seven million unique patients
- Deployment of J2-developed utilities, including our enterprise monitoring package and source code control solution
Subsequent phases of Northwell’s HealthShare initiative have included:
- Hundreds of additional interfaces, including bi-directional exchange of C-CDA documents and further migration of legacy eGate interfaces to Ensemble
- Design and development of additional event notification use cases
- Deployment of HealthShare Health Insight, including customized data model design and reporting capabilities
- Continued hands-on mentoring to build Northwell’s internal expertise on the HealthShare platform
Our Northwell customer profile has even more information.
Salesforce Work
Mobile Phlebotomy
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Northwell Health saw fewer patients going into their hospitals, clinics, and labs, delaying routine screenings, preventative care, and even treatment of illnesses.
The provider’s phlebotomy team decided they needed to evolve their approach to patient care, so they partnered with J2 and Salesforce to streamline their approach to mobile phlebotomy. Northwell Health’s goal was to bring the lab to the patients’ homes and replace the many disparate manual systems they were using before.
Using a combination of Salesforce Service Cloud, Field Service, and Maps, J2 and Salesforce empowered Northwell’s team to more quickly and easily schedule mobile phlebotomy teams to meet patient demand.
The process
Providers easily submit home draw request forms online and include the prescription and tests to be drawn. Previously, these blood draw requests had to be manually completed and emailed or faxed to the office for processing. Providers can also use email to submit these request forms, a once manual process that Salesforce’s Email-to-Case functionality has replaced, allowing Northwell’s team to queue and process these requests.
Once the requests are funneled into Salesforce, they are reviewed by Northwell team members, who schedule them into Field Service.
J2 has enhanced and extended Northwell’s Field Service functionality to accurately schedule multiple recurring appointments on an ongoing basis (according to the submitted orders) and dispatch the correct technician to fill the appointment. Thus, if a technician is unexpectedly absent, the dispatch can easily reschedule all appointments as needed.
Technicians in the field can use the Field Service Mobile app on their mobile device to view their schedule for the day. This schedule includes all of the information for each appointment, along with a map and real-time directions. Technicians can communicate with dispatch through the app, as well as record the appointment information directly.
Once a technician has finished for the day, they can bring their specimens to the lab for drop off, and a Northwell team member can print their entire day’s worth of requisitions at the click of a button, using custom functionality built by J2.
As an additional feature, J2 also built the ability to import LabFly appointments into Field Service, allowing Northwell to see all appointments across multiple scheduling platforms in one place.
The results
Northwell now has the ability to understand the details of a technician’s day. The provider can more accurately report details of each appointment, including any issues that may arise during it, as well as log the mileage a technician has traveled during their day.
J2’s implementation of Service Cloud and Field Service has also allowed for more efficient collaboration, timely execution, and a better patient experience at Northwell Health, while Field Service has enabled teams to efficiently schedule and route their visits to see more patients per day than ever before.
Supply Chain
Northwell further partnered with J2 to assist their Supply Chain team in streamlining their contract review and approval process.
J2 built out a robust community experience to allow buyers to upload contracts for review and track the progress of submitted contracts.
After J2’s work, Northwell team members now have a better workflow for their day-to-day tasks. Northwell administration team members also have more access to detailed reporting that will allow the team to review potential sticking points to determine where process improvements might be needed.
