Cleveland Clinic

World renowned clinic extends electronic prescription capabilities with Sun integration platform

Founded in 1921, the not-for-profit Cleveland Clinic is a leading academic medical center serving the Cleveland, Ohio metropolitan region, and one of the world’s largest and most renowned healthcare facilities. More than 2,000 healthcare personnel provide care to some 2.6 million patients annually, and the clinic is regularly recognized as one of the top four hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report.

Business Issues

Eliminate errors in filling prescriptions that resulted from misinterpreting handwritten notes
Enable e-prescription functionality between clinic and retail pharmacies
Improve physician-practice workflow and patient care
Increase patient satisfaction

Solution

The Cleveland Clinic sought to extend its ability to fulfill patient prescriptions online at retail pharmacies. Using Sun integration software, the medical center was able to synch up communications between its internal prescription system and those existing at retail pharmacies.

Business Results

Ensured accurate filling of e-prescriptions
Enabled communications among disparate e-prescription systems at the clinic and retail pharmacies
Enhanced patient safety and care

Products / Solutions

Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator

Success at a Glance

Cleveland Clinic is one of the best known and most respected healthcare facilities in the United States, thanks in part to the clinic’s enthusiastic and early adoption of technology to improve the quality of patient care.

For example, Cleveland was one of the first medical centers in the country to deploy an e-prescription initiative that automated the entire prescription process-ensuring the capture of important patient information, as well as substantially decreasing the potential for errors resulting from misreading a physician's handwriting.

“ Without the Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator, these prescription systems would still exist in isolation. Sun's solution enables the systems to talk to each other and pass messages that adhere to standards, decreasing the potential for misinterpretation on both sides. ”

— Albert T. Edwards, Director of the Office of Clinical Integration & Interfaces, Cleveland Clinic

But on the road to becoming a “paperless” healthcare facility, Cleveland Clinic hit a bump. While its internal e-prescription applications worked well within the hospital’s walls, successful transmission of this information to surrounding retail pharmacies proved more challenging.

Internally, physicians wrote prescription orders to the clinic’s EpicCare health care information system. However, that application wasn’t uniformly compatible with the e-prescription applications at major retail pharmacies.

The challenge lay in creating standards that meshed on both sides. For example, pharmacy standards call for all prescriptions to be written in numbers only, whereas the hospital standards allow clinicians to enter additional information, such as the size of the package.

To ensure a seamless flow of information, the clinic turned to Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator--part of the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite--to provide the core integration platform, including systems connectivity, messaging and transformation capabilities, required to enable the clinic’s and the pharmacies’ e-prescription systems to communicate effectively.

Today, thanks to Sun, Cleveland Clinic physicians can write e-prescriptions for their patients with the confidence that they will be filled, quickly, easily and accurately at hundreds of retail pharmacies in the surrounding area. And patients have greater security knowing that the medications prescribed for them are the ones they receive.