Mid America Clinical Laboratories operates blood labs and manages labs in hospitals as well. As with almost all healthcare operations these days, there's little tolerance for IT processes that don't keep up with the demands of the business. 

In a recent interview with FierceCIO, Mark Ballard, CIO for Mid America, discussed how automation tools streamlined IT processes and improved reliability at a relatively low cost.

FierceCIO: What were your main drivers for deploying automation software? 

Mark Ballard: We're a clinical lab. Lab results are what we sell. When you go to a doctor's office and he tells you to go give blood, we're the folks who draw the blood and send the results back to him. We also manage hospital labs. We have to print out, fax and email reports out to clients. We use automation software to pull the information off the BI tool, break it down and send it out. 

We knew that we needed automation. The reliability of our IT processes was labor-intensive. We had help desk people checking systems every hour, and we had all kinds of fixes to make sure everything was running right. 

FCIO: Can you give an example of how automation tools have improved business or IT processes?

Ballard: Within healthcare, and labs specifically, there is a lot of hosted technology out there that we ended up having to do a lot of weird scripting solutions for. There are all kinds of ways to get data out of those hosting solutions. We had a bunch of automation tools for individual needs, but to make all of those works in conjunction with each other was very difficult. 

We have certain lab times in which tests have to be done. When you have a heart attack and you have a test that shows how bad it is, we have a certain amount of time to get the results out. We use AutoMate [from Network Automation] to make sure that that process is constantly running. If a PC dies or if something goes wrong with the application, we have AutoMate reset that for us.

FCIO: How was the implementation?

Ballard: We started using AutoMate about six years ago. We started with a small project to test out the software to make sure we liked it. Since it started as an IT process and an ETL-type process, it was fairly easy to implement and control since there was just a handful of folks responsible for it running it correctly. 

Once we got comfortable with the software, we started moving it into business processes. We kept moving more stuff on it.

We also have expanded to use it a lot for monitoring. We monitor all kinds of systems. We have a lot of client interfaces, where we have orders coming into our software. We use it to make sure our IT processes as well as business processes are running correctly.

FCIO: How hard was it to justify this investment?

Ballard: One of the nice things about this software is that it is a low enough cost to get into that it doesn't require a huge sales pitch internally to justify the money. I think we invest $5000 or $10,000 in the first couple licenses just to get the thing going. For us, that's a good amount of money that we could risk on software that we think will do the job. We started out with an easy sell.

FCIO: What have been the main benefits of business process automation?

Ballard: The main benefit is the reliability. If we had to mess with it all the time and we had to reboot all the time, that's kind of where we were before. If you can't count on it working consistently all the time, you might as well not even have it. After that, I would say that the ease-of-use and the flexibility in the software are probably second and third benefits. 

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