I am pleased to have found a new option for ordering and receiving reports of clinical laboratory tests. Quest has apparently funded development of an interface by Rick Williams and his team at Williams Medical Technologies. This interface is working well for me. At this point it appears that the laboratory results are stored in tables not interrogated by the current PQRI scoring scripts, but I am confident that this will not be a long term problem. For now, I am indeed a happy camper!
Is this something that might be put into a future patch as an option under globals? Quest and Labcorp are the big ones around here, and I bet in a large part of the US.
The way this works is that Quest pays a vendor (Williams Medical Technologies) to develop a proprietary connector. The lab also pays a fee for every installation of the connector. You have to request that Quest authorize (pay for) your connector to them through the vendor. The lab may or may not approve of your connection to them; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
Since the connector is proprietary, it can’t be included in the OpenEMR main installation.
ZH Healthcare is also an approved Vendor for Quest. We have the complete Bi-directional certification from Quest and is on track to be their Gold Partner.
My enquiry with ZH Healthcare reveals that there is a monthly subscription charge for the physician - this is bad news for the long suffering physician just for ordering tests. The model for williams technology is different - the entire cost of the interface is borne by quest, as it should rightly be. No monthly subscription costs.
My enquiry with ZH Healthcare reveals that there is a monthly subscription
charge for the physician - this is bad news for the long suffering
physician just for ordering tests. The model for williams technology is
different - the entire cost of the interface is borne by quest, as it
should rightly be. No monthly subscription costs.
Hi
I am not sure whether others are providing interfaces to multiple labs. ZH Healthcare is providing/approved interfaces(bidirectional) to Quest, Labcorp, Solstas, Atherotech, Bioreference and many more for one small fee. This fee will also cover interface within the Care Coordination Module for submission to various registries and HIEs. The interface charges are for continuing maintenance of the servers. Quest and others provides an initial fee to setup and testing of a new provider, but they do not offer continuous support. We tried our best to see how the economics would work but found that long term support of practices will not be practical if there is no charge. The service has to be provided for years.
Just wanted to let everybody know that the reporting components for the Quest interface developed by WMT are in the works. Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback, we will continue to improve/upgrade the interface package into the future. Bi-directional Labcorp interface is currently in testing and will be made available as soon as possible.
To bad it don’t work in Windows. I talked to them the other day, I have had the interface on order for months. I host open EMR with windows 2012 server IIS so theres no solution there for me. I used to pull them off the Quest site in CDA format but when the lab interface changed it broke everything.
Bi-directional interfaces for Quest Diagnostics & LabCorp have both been widely deployed and are in daily use in numerous locations now. Reporting components are nearly done (reports are being designed & written to work with both Quest & LabCorp which makes it take significant time), and an interface for CPL laboratories is also being beta tested.
At this time, it’s difficult to make the argument that re-inventing the wheel for use with a Microsoft operating system is a financially or functionally viable option. The amount of programming/development time and work (which as everyone knows, Time == $$) to design, create, test, certify, & maintain these things is quite significant.
We have a bi-directional Lab Interoperability Hub(LIH) certified by LabCorp. You are welcome to check out our OpenEMR-Labcorp demo in this link LIH DEMO.