It’s no secret – even in the age of electronic orders and results, healthcare organizations face huge issues in managing the flow of orders and results between labs and physicians. Electronic orders were meant to do away with reliance on fax machines and to avoid having a patient hand-deliver paper copies of orders. Unfortunately, for many healthcare organizations the lab and EMR systems in place simply don’t speak the same language when it comes to order codes, test panels, and the identities of patients and providers. Successfully getting blood-work drawn, tested, and results routed back to your physician can be a real challenge.

IMT OQM™ (Order Queue Manager) takes the incompatibilities and mis-matches out of the order – result process by coordinating workflows, managing patient, provider, and order identifiers, and using seamless integration between EMRs and Lab systems. At each stage in the workflow, IMT OQM validates:

OQM automates the routing and reconciliation of orders and results between EMRs and the clinical test systems. Here’s how it works:

1. When a physician creates an order, the EMR sends the electronic orders to OQM.

2. OQM verifies the patient’s identity, matches test codes, and sends the updated orders to the Lab system or Radiology system.

3. When a patient arrives, a staff member locates the patient’s pending order and releases it to the clinical test system. If necessary, OQM will also generate a new patient registration at the same time, so that the test system can accept the order without any additional manual intervention.

4. The laboratory or imaging system sends the results to OQM, which routes the results to the ordering physician’s EMR. OQM matches the result to the patient identifier and order number so that the EMR can attach the result to the original order.

5. If a result arrives at OQM without a corresponding order, the result can be routed to the EMR for the correct provider to attach to the patient’s clinical record so that it can be seen at the next visit.

A centralized lab and radiology provider for a Canadian province had a problem. Despite moving to electronic ordering, staff at the lab and diagnostic centers were still spending significant time on manual processes and data augmentation to process incoming orders.

For example, at one facility the physician would create an electronic order in the EMR, which was printed and faxed directly to the hospital lab. Even with electronic order transmission enabled, testing center staff printed out the order and then re-entered them into the lab system. When orders were electronically transmitted, the orders would often not load due to either missing or misaligned data. This posed many challenges in the efficiency and accuracy of the process.

IMT Order Queue Manager (OQM), bridged the gap between the EMR and clinical testing systems, and routed results back to the correct provider. OQM collects the orders sent by a provider’s EMR, groups appropriate tests into a single order and maps order test codes appropriately for the destination testing system. OQM automatically releases the orders to the fulfillment system based on flexible timing rules.

When test results are available, OQM sends results back to the physician’s EMR. The results can be seamlessly loaded into the EMR because OQM reconciles the result with the original order and converts the test system order codes back to the order test codes that the EMR understands.

Key Benefits:

• Automated & simplified lab order fulfillment

• Fewer opportunities for data entry errors

• Fewer resources manage the lab order queue

• Accurate identification of the patient and provider through the order lifecycle

• Easy management of provider-patient-location relationships

• Simple and efficient management of routing rules

IMT’s OQM is built on the industry-leading IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management platform (formerly Initiate). OQM automates the full lifecycle of processing orders and routing results. You can manage daily tasks and workloads while avoiding unnecessary patient registration and manual handling of lab orders. With its modular design, you can determine how much of the lifecycle you want to automate.