Integrating the GAIN ABS System with an Electronic Record System like WITS

[As adolescent treatment providers invest in eletronic medical record systems, a natural question arises: how do we integrate our assessment tool into our new record system? Dr. Michael Dennis, creator of the GAIN, has some answers. --Ed.]
This post is a little technical, so here's the bottom line: we will be happy to work with individual treatment providers or with vendors to customize their systems to integrate GAIN data into their electronic medical records. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for contact information.)
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During the past 3 years, Chestnut Health Systems has collaborated with the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) and over 30 agencies to revise the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN) instrument and software to allow it to better integrate with the growing number of electronic medical records systems. Several people have asked us to give a brief update on the status of what we have done so far in this area.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.  They have defined a set of standards to be used to allow applications to communicate with each other and share data securely over the internet or other network connection. When a  software system is designed to adhere to these standards, we say it uses Web Services. The GAIN Assessment Building System (ABS) was designed to these standards and we have used this protocol to integrate our system with other electronic medical records like the Web Infrastructure for Treatment Services (WITS) from FEI, which is used by over a dozen state, local and private agenices.
In collaboration with FEI, we developed several Web Services that perform different operations within our system and return different sets of data to a secondary application. The source code for these applications is available to other electronic medical record system vendors or managers.

Some of the requests that can be made include the ability to:

• Create or update client records in an external system and "push" that information to GAIN ABS to create or update client records there
  • Ensures that client information is the same in both systems
  • Syncs information between the systems by essentially creating one client record
• Return all of the GAIN variables for a given assessment that can be parsed to find a subset of variables to be stored--in other words, all the data from a given assessment can be sent to the electronic medical record system, and the data manager can decide what to keep
• Once the GAIN Recommendation and Referral Summary (GRRS) report has been generated, the electronic medical record system can pull description text, DSM diagnostic impression or ASAM placement data, and treatment recommendations from GRRS fields
• Automate log-in to the GAIN ABS system, so the two systems flow seamlessly and act like one integrated system to the end user
  • For example, a user can be logged in to their electronic record system. With a client selected, the user can choose to perform a GAIN assessment and skip the GAIN ABS log-in and client search screens. The user goes directly to the GAIN ABS screen to choose which assessment he or she wants to administer.

All of the functionality listed above currently exists in a system where GAIN ABS and WITS are being used in conjunction for a set of providers. We worked with the development team at FEI to develop these Web Services and the interface within their application to request these services. We adhere to all W3C standards and use the latest in internet security standards to ensure that all data transmissions are secure. Additional functionality may be developed depending on the set of data you wish to store in a secondary system.
Contact Information - For more information on using the GAIN Assessments, please email Matt Orndorff or phone him at (309) 451-7833. 
For further technical information regarding integrating GAIN data into your software application, feel free to email Mike Vacca or phone him at 309-451-7769. 
For more information on the WITS electronic record system, please email Chris White at FEI, or contact him at (443) 270-5124.
Note: the author thanks Mike Vacca for help drafting this post.