Hi Everyone,

Just have a question about Echo interface... BB lead tech before me did not want to interface our Echo for fear of techs just accepting what the Echo said without really looking at the results. She put it off for 3 years. Our IT guy thinks he heard stories of things not crossing correctly from Echos??? Now my director wants me to get this up and going. What is your experience with your Echo interface?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jackie BS MLS (ASCP)

We have 5 Echos interfaced to Meditech 5.57.

Hi Everyone,

Just have a question about Echo interface... BB lead tech before me did not want to interface our Echo for fear of techs just accepting what the Echo said without really looking at the results. She put it off for 3 years. Our IT guy thinks he heard stories of things not crossing correctly from Echos??? Now my director wants me to get this up and going. What is your experience with your Echo interface?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jackie BS MLS (ASCP)

My hospital system, with 5 campuses, has a total of 9 ECHO's all interfaced with MEDITECH 5.6.4. It works flawlessly. Only GROUP/SCREEN AND DAT requisitions upload to the ECHO and only GROUP and CONFIRM testing export to MEDITECH. This is because of how our SCREENS are set up in MEDITECH. The reactions for the antibody screens are resulted as a sub screen and it would have required us to build all new tests, etc to make that work, or something like that.

We have 3 ECHOs interfaced with Sunquest BB. I have not heard of any problems. Abnormal reactions that do not meet the "truth" tables in the instrument or Sunquest are flagged and they require tech intervention.

We have 5 Echoes interfaced to BBCS. There were multiple problems developing the interface because we were the first facillity to use the interface. But, for the past few months, the interface has worked well - no results transferred incorrectly. Group, Screen, and DAT are interfaced.

I have an Echo, and have ordered and bought the interface, but have not received it as of yet. Since August.

Just make sure that you can still have a high speed internet connection to Immucor for your remote diagnostics. HCA Meditech (not the same as Meditech controlled directly from Meditech) has been fussy in the past about allowing any connections like that on a instrument that interfaces to their system. They wanted us to only have a dial-up connection and the remote diagnostics will not work with that slow of a connection.

Just have your legal department draw up a privacy/security agreement for Immucor to sign.

Just have your legal department draw up a privacy/security agreement for Immucor to sign.

Did that actually work for you with HCA Meditech?

It made our IT security people happy and they allowed the high speed connections. We have several companies that have signed them. Beckman, Siemens etc.

Just make sure that you can still have a high speed internet connection to Immucor for your remote diagnostics. HCA Meditech (not the same as Meditech controlled directly from Meditech) has been fussy in the past about allowing any connections like that on a instrument that interfaces to their system. They wanted us to only have a dial-up connection and the remote diagnostics will not work with that slow of a connection.

Our system is an HCA partnership. This has been the most frustrating thing! :mad:

I don't understand why our Chemistry department with their Seimens analyzers can have network access but Immucor can't. The dial up connection does not work.

Just have your legal department draw up a privacy/security agreement for Immucor to sign.

This has not worked for us! HCA continues to balk at our attempts to get IMMUCOR a high-speed connection. :mad:

Currently we use Mediware HCLL. You have to release the results from the ECHO but then verify the results in the BB computer system. Techs must look at the results before they release them from the blood bank system, they are not autoverified directly from the BBIS. We wanted to interface with the instrument so that we would not have to worry about clerical errors which I think is more dangerous.

We have the ECHO interfaced with Meditech Magic and it works great - no problems. The results come over to Meditech and the techs review and finalize there. We also interfaced with McKesson HBB and it worked fine with that as well.