Article

How Maimonides Medical Center & ELLKAY Reimagined Interoperability

In today’s healthcare environment, patients move fluidly between providers, health systems, labs, and virtual care. They expect their data and care plans to move just as seamlessly.

However, laboratory workflows often find themselves lagging. Patients choose where to have labs drawn based on convenience or cost, but most systems aren’t designed to support that flexibility creating fragmentation, manual work, and gaps in care.

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The Challenge: Patient Choice vs. Fragmented Workflows

At Maimonides Medical Center, the challenge wasn’t just connectivity; it was aligning workflows across systems, departments, and external labs.

Ensuring accurate patient matching, maintaining provider visibility, and capturing charges reliably were critical, especially as virtual care and cross-organizational collaboration expanded.

The Solution: Lab Shadowing

In partnership with ELLKAY, Maimonides implemented Lab Shadowing, an interoperability model that allows lab orders to follow the patient.

When a patient presents lab work, their order is already available in the system, accurately matched and ready to process, without manual entry or workflow disruption. Behind the scenes, ELLKAY enables real-time exchange of orders, demographics, and insurance data across the multiple laboratories used by Maimonides patients.

The result is simple but powerful:

Beyond the Lab: Expanding the Model

Maimonides extended this approach beyond laboratory workflows using ELLKAY’s data management platform:

• ED consults from remote hospitals now flow in real time to the main campus, replacing manual processes and enabling electronic orders, results, and billing

• Cath Lab workflows were unified across two hospitals with different IT systems, supported by enterprise patient matching

This created a scalable foundation for interoperability across the organization.

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The Impact: Operational, Financial, and Patient Experience

The results go far beyond IT improvements:

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A Strategic Approach to Interoperability

This partnership highlights an important shift: interoperability is no longer just a technical goal; it’s a strategic capability. By aligning technology with real-world workflows, Maimonides and ELLKAY created a model that supports patient choice, improves efficiency, and strengthens financial performance.

Lab Shadowing is more than a single solution; it’s a blueprint. As healthcare continues to expand beyond traditional boundaries, organizations that enable seamless data flow across systems will be best positioned to deliver connected, patient-centered care.

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