Integrating Amtelco with Engage Platform

Process Overview

An Amtelco integration plan calls for each speciality to have a single Engage group representing the currently on-call specialist(s). These groups would then be part of the Engage Mobile roster to allow contact to the specialists via Engage Mobile. For VCS and the badges, these groups would also be synchronized with Vocera Voice Server groups, which would enable users to contact the specialist via the app/device.

To make this work, the Engage Amtelco Adapter translates each schedule entry in the Amtelco schedule into a (potentially future) assignment in Engage Platform. The Engage Assignment Manager Adapter is then used to mark those assignments as active (current) and expired. Engage Voice Group Sync Adapter is used to then synchronize the active assignments with an Engage Platform group based on the assignment role and location and then (if needed for VCS or badge integration), Engage Voice Group Sync Adapter is used to synchronize those groups with Vocera Voice Server groups.

This document describes the Amtelco and the Engage Amtelco Adapter part of the overall process. Engage Assignment Manager Adapter, Engage Assignment Group Sync Adapter, and Engage Voice Group Sync Adapter configuration is described in Care Team Sync Integration. The configuration for those components will be similar to that used for assignment systems like Epic that report future assignments and specify an assignment start and end date. See Understanding Voice Group Sync for additional details.

Amtelco Overview

The normal process for using Amtelco within a hospital environment is to have multiple Amtelco schedules, each controlled by a different physician's group or similar organization, under the hospital's umbrella Amtelco environment. Schedule data is entered using the Amtelco Application. The Engage Amtelco Adapter retrieves schedule information from this web application.

Within a single schedule, there are shifts which include the following information:

• ShiftDefinitionId. This provides the primary identifier for the shift and is used as part of the assignment_id.
• Contacts, representing a single physician or similar specialist. These are identified by an internal id value. Amtelco provides all attributes available on each Contact, and the Engage Amtelco Adapter can configure any additional pieces of data on the contact to be stored on the User.
• Roles. These can be mapped to a Role in Engage based on the name of the Role.
• A Start and End Datetime with zone. This specifies the start and end time that the particular staff is on-call for that Role and Schedule.

Integration Considerations

This section describes two topics for consideration in integration:

• Contact Identification
• Schedule Naming

Contact Identification

The Engage Amtelco Adapter is designed to provide an open ended mechanism for matching Amtelco contacts to Engage user records. The adapter configuration allows the Administrator to get the list of Amtelco Contact attributes and map any set of these attributes to the appropriate Engage User attributes.

In order to perform user matching, at a minimum first name and last name must be mapped to an Amtelco attribute. Additionally, if Amtelco provides a login, Engage can create and link to a user based on the login. Amtelco is not guaranteed to include such an attribute, in which case some configuration may have to be added to include the AD username as a new Contact field.

When a user has been matched or created, the user will have an identity linked to the Amtelco interface with the users ListID and the id of the interface which created it.

Schedule Naming

The schedule name and Role Name are the primary pieces of data used by the Engage Amtelco Adapter to identify the on-call speciality and location for each schedule entry. The adapter configuration provides a Schedule Mapping to link to an appropriate location for the schedule, and a Role Mapping per schedule which allows for mapping to the appropriate role for that location.

Engage Amtelco Adapter Configuration

The following considerations should be used in setting the primary configuration fields:

• The Amtelco URL which provides the Amtelco endpoint.
• The Login and optional password with permission to access the required schedule.
• The primary importance of the polling interval is balancing the speed with which updates are detected, and the system load. Since only "current" (active) assignments are relevant, the primary driver for this balance is how long the hospital is willing to allow changes of schedule which occur around or after their start time to take to propagate to the hospital staff. In order to prevent excessive load for both Amtelco and Engage Platform, this value should not be set to less than 5 minutes.
• It is assumed that all schedules use the same timezone, particularly for their start and end times. In most circumstances the hospital, the Engage Platform and the schedulers are all in the same time zone and using the System Timezone is correct.
• The adapter allows for an instant resynchronization of the Schedules or directory contacts.Resynchronizing the contact details will clear the cache and recreated all contact details and voice profiles. Press the Synchronize Schedules button located on the side bar, to instantly synchronize all schedules. Press the Synchronize Contacts button located on the side bar, to instantly synchronize all contacts.
  Note: The resynchronization time is configurable in the interface properties file.

Contact Mappings

As mentioned above, the Engage Amtelco Adapter provides a mapping mechanism to map Amtelco attributes to Engage User attributes. In order to get the full list of Amtelco and user attributes, a valid URL and login must be configured, then press the Read Attributes in the adapter. For configuration details, see Configuring an Vocera Amtelco Adapter.

Schedule Mappings

The primary purpose of schedule mappings is to determine the role and location of the created assignment. These in turn will be used by the Engage Assignment Group Sync Adapter to determine the Group mapping, so the correct mapping is necessary to ensure the currently on-call specialist gets added to the correct Group, and thus enable users to contact them.

The mappings map the schedule name and the shift name to the role and location using regular expressions and mappings for each. This provides a significant degree of mapping flexibility, so that for instance:

• The schedule name could be mapped to the location and the role name to the role.
• The location could be hard coded and the role name mapped to the role.
• The schedule name could be used to choose the mapping and the role name parsed to map to both the location and the role.

Currently there is no capability to, for example, take part of the role name and part of the schedule name in determining a single field such as the role name.

The following example matches all schedules, and maps the location and role from the full name of the Amtelco schedules and roles:

location.location_id, location.facility.name, role.name, role.facility.name

In the example above, note the use of the "AMT:" prefix on the location id. This is to ensure that the location is only used by Amtelco-created assignments. This is because Amtelco-created assignments must not be used for delivery of Engage alerts, which in turn means that these locations should never be linked to any beds. Therefore, the mapping ensures that the location is "owned" by the adapter, so it is not used by other adapters and beds are not accidentally assigned to it.