It involves hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment. If someone is brought into the hospital emergency room at 3 in the morning, the lab must be available to provide immediate information for the medical personnel to help in the decision on what treatment is necessary or if a patient should be transferred to Iowa City. The health center, which is basically a 9 to 5 operation, also needs laboratory equipment and personnel to a lesser extent. Most samples of blood or tissue at the health center are mailed to outside labs in Kansas City or elsewhere because immediate results are usually not required. One lab, under integration, could be expanded and improved to serve all the local needs.
Registration is another area of time-consuming duplication.
Say you are a patient at the health center, for instance, You need to go over registration information such as name, address, telephone number, employer, insurance provider, and all the rest. The doctor at the health center might decide to send you to physical therapy, and there you will need to provide all the same information for their registration system. Physical therapy could decide you really need to be admitted as a patient at the hospital. Then you go to the hospital and take the time to provide all the information for their registration system. Looking down the road, it might be possible that your one registration in the computer could also serve as your registration at the university hospital in Iowa City.