CINCINNATI CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL SUCCESS STORY

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Makes the Change to Scriptel's Lower Cost eSignature Solution

The Client

Cincinnati Children's, a nonprofit academic medical center established in 1883, is one of the oldest and most distinguished pediatric hospitals in the United States. They offer comprehensive clinical services, from treatments for rare and complex conditions to well-childcare. In the 2018-19 U.S. News & World Report survey of best children's hospitals, Cincinnati Children's ranks No. 2 among all Honor Roll hospitals. With more than 600 registered beds, Cincinnati Children's had more than 1.3 million patient encounters and served patients from all 50 states and 58 countries, including 589 international patients, in fiscal 2017.

The Situation

In late 2000, Cincinnati Children's joined hospitals across the country and deployed Epic software. As part of Cincinnati Children's Epic technical team, Jeremy Amend, Epic Team Project Manager, provides day–to–day support in setting up workstations, records, and integrations of other applications which tie into the hospital's Epic system. Since implementing eSignature pads from another company within Epic Hyperspace years earlier, the hospital had begun experiencing issues as newer versions of their Citrix infrastructure were deployed. The pads had been there long enough that they were coming off warranty, so Jeremy and his team reached out to Epic for information on what was the latest available solution. "At the time I wasn't aware of another vendor who manufactured eSignature devices that were compatible with Epic," said Jeremy.

The Opportunity

Scriptel has been an Epic Hyperspace Target Platform and is verified Citrix Ready since 2016. After finding this out from Epic support, Jeremy and his team contacted Scriptel and then moved to a small pilot. "The technical and cost benefits were clear from the initial sample and POC call, we just needed to make sure Scriptel's pads were going to fit the current workflow in our environment and would allow us to stage out a deployment," said Jeremy.

The Decision

His team confirmed that Scriptel's pads easily worked in Epic alongside their older solution within the same Citrix system and produced the expected reduction in user support requests. Cincinnati Children's moved ahead within 4 months of the small pilot to a partial fleet replacement, saving over $30,000 so far versus purchasing new units from its previous supplier.

“"At the time I wasn't aware of another vendor who manufactured eSignature devices that were compatible with Epic software."”

—Jeremy Amend, Epic Team Project Manager

The Results

Icon Immediate Cost Savings No need to wait for a full fleet replacement: Scriptel's lower cost solution fits right into existing system infrastructure and works right alongside Cincinnati Children's older signature pads.
Icon Greater Efficiency Cincinnati Children's broke free from legacy serial COM port technology and took advantage of Scriptel's modern native USB plug-and-play offering. Doctors, nurses and other hospital staff are no longer restarting their Epic sessions to get their signature pads to work.
Icon Citrix Ready Scriptel knows Citrix well and has set up their integration with Epic to do what any IT department should expect: make deploying a signature pad just as simple as just plugging it in to any workstation.

Scriptel Hardware

A Brief History