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“Our plans for OpenLayer are almost limitless. The Web has much to offer our users and OpenLayer makes that an economical possibility for Prairie View. We are currently looking to extend these features to our Great Plains financial system. After that, I guess we are limited only by our imagination. OpenLayer truly has restored our information systems.”
Dan Evans, CFO |
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Prairie View: A Place of Reflection, Restoration and Recovery
Prairie View has fostered healing and growth in families and individuals’ lives for more than 50 years. As the largest and longest-serving, non-profit behavioral and mental health center in the state of Kansas, our professional staff takes pride in bringing about restoration through services that combine compassion with dignity and respect.
Part of our professional staff that rarely gets noticed is the Information Systems department. "That’s by design," says Director of Information Systems Merle Enns. "You don’t want to see us because that usually means something is not working correctly. We do our best to be unseen."
Prairie View, like so many healthcare providers, employs several different and diversified technologies to manage information. For example, we use PRO-IV to manage patient records, FoxPRO/MSSQL for EMR and Great Plains for financial records. Keeping our systems in top operating order is just as critical as keeping any part of our facility in excellent condition.
Technology changing rapidly can pose a potentially significant cost to operations. CFO Dan Evans commented, "We work diligently to provide quality information systems while keeping cost as low as possible. One of the ways we have recently been able to do that is with the acquisition of OpenLayer from PROplus Systems, Inc. We were facing a substantial cost to upgrade some of our systems to accommodate some needed integration and to keep our information access flexible and easy to manage. With OpenLayer we were able to upgrade and integrate our systems at a fraction of the time and cost."
OpenLayer gives new life to older applications by transforming them to Web 2.0 applications and giving them Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capabilities. SOA is similar to building with Legos. Imagine that each of your primary business processes is an individual, functionally-shaped Lego with snap-on connectors. You build and reconfigure your applications by snapping together these software Legos in a fraction of the time and cost of previous technologies.
At Prairie View, we were able to reconfigure two dissimilar applications to work together as one with this Lego design. With the help of OpenLayer we are also able to take advantage of many of the user productivity features of the Web. Our application is available anywhere, anytime, allowing our field staff to provide patient services rather than taking extra time to travel to the office to access the system.
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