Highlights
- Built backend HL7 integrations connecting the client's application to four external diagnostic vendors via IPsec-secured channels, reducing per-order scheduling from ~10 minutes to ~5 seconds across 20,000+ diagnostic orders
Project Narrative
Some disability exams require diagnostics that the account doesn’t perform in-house: labs and related services fulfilled by external vendors such as Quest, VirtuOx, BigSky, LabCorp, and Trident Connect. Originally, whenever an appointment needed one of these diagnostics, a staff member had to schedule it directly through each vendor’s own interface: sometimes a phone call, sometimes a web portal, with a different process for every vendor. The work was manual and demanding, and because a required diagnostic gates completion of the exam, a slow vendor loop delayed billable work.
Rather than automate the manual scheduling, I worked directly with the development teams at these diagnostic companies to build true backend integrations with each of them. I used Mirth Connect as the integration engine and authored HL7 messages conforming to each vendor’s specification, then wired the integration into the MDE web application so our team could request and receive diagnostic orders from a single place (with calendar integration) instead of juggling four external systems. Orders flowed out to the vendors and results came back into the application, with documents stored in S3. Because each vendor had different requirements, every integration was a bespoke build against that vendor’s spec rather than a one-size template.
In addition, due to the nature of the sensitivity of information and security, we worked with the cloud architect team to create an IPsec tunnel to vendor services.
The result collapsed a roughly 10-minute manual scheduling task into about 5 seconds per order, and the integration has handled 20,000+ diagnostic orders.