The Background

Ealing Hospital NHS Trust is a general hospital of approximately 330 beds. Running extract routines on their Totalcare Patient Administration System (PAS) took a lot of IT staff time. The hospital recognised a need to automate and schedule this process, releasing valuable time for the information team.

The Problem

A 3rd party tool (AQUIP) was used to extract data from Totalcare. This information was then imported into either Excel or Access for reports to be generated.
The PAS system is mainly used in the hours of 8:30am and 17:00pm. During this time the processing of any data extraction routines against the PAS system needed to be avoided. Ealing needed a system to manage this process.

The Solution

U-REST© – Universal Report Scheduling & Extraction Tool for PAS is a. net-enabled Windows based scheduling and file transfer tool (ROBOT) that monitors and executes all the scheduled data extraction from PAS. The resulting data files are transferred to the users’ local machine on the network for further processing. The system runs on MS Windows based server and uses trusts Shared MS SQL server to store application specific data. IONIT created the Report Extraction Scheduling Tool for PAS (U-REST©), which was launched in June 2003.

The Benefits

Reduced costs significantly by 40,000 hrs
Reduced errors resulting from manual intervention
Ensured that the data is extracted and available when scheduled
Allowed the data extraction processes to be run in the batch windows available on the PAS system, thereby decreasing the load on PAS during peak hours
Increased job satisfaction by eliminating routine tasks