The implementation of information systems has grown more rapidly in the past decade. Various agencies and organizations ranging from government offices, hospitals, campus, companies, and others began to implement digital systems. The point is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of productivity. But unfortunately, not all of the agencies have implemented system integration.
About System Integration
System integration is the key to the realization of a comprehensive information system. To interpret this concept, consider the following illustration.
A hospital has digitalized it to do various records. Starting from the data collection of patients entered in the emergency room, outpatient, and inpatient, financial, staffing, and pharmacy. However, digital recording is still done using a simple application and stand by each unit.
This causes the management to still have to check one by one. Decision making is still not possible. Therefore, the systems in each of these units need to be ‘sewn up’ in order to form a more complete Hospital Management Information System or “Sistem Informasi Manajemen Rumah Sakit” (SIMRS).
Therefore, emergency patients who apparently have to do hospitalization can be directly processed just once. Even when later making payments, the cashier just simply enter the patient’s medical record number to get the total cost of treatment instead of having to still confirm and calculate manually to other related units. Furthermore, of course the management also made it easier to carry out monitoring and evaluation. Decisions on hospital business processes and operations are more effective and efficient.
The process of ‘sewing’ each system (application) to become one unit and can be interconnected is called system integration.
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The Importance of System Integration
Basically an integrated system is intended to improve work efficiency and effectiveness. Given the increasingly complex needs of coordination between units in an agency or organization, the presence of system integration is even more crucial.
The details of the important reasons for system integration are as follows:
1) Increase Cooperation between Sections
A body cannot stand alone and there are always parts related to one another. For example, to pay a marketing employee’s salary, the HR department will need some supporting data from the marketing division regarding the targets achieved, the personnel division regarding attendance, and so on.
2) Speed up the Communication Process
System integration will facilitate the exchange of data between one part with another part of an organization or agency. In a hospital, for example, the cashier can immediately recap the total bill of patients since they were in the emergency room, hospitalization, and pharmacy in just minutes.
Even in government agencies, for example, between one agency office with another can also communicate more easily. For example, RSD requires new patient data. Simply by entering the patient’s KTP number, population data (as needed) at the Population Service can be automatically recorded to the system in the hospital in a short time.
3) Data Access in Real Time
An information system was created to enable users to access data in real time. For example, the Transportation Department officer can directly monitor the condition of the highway from the office’s command center room through the integration of CCTV on the road and the monitoring system in the office.
4) Ease of Policy Taking
This is much needed by management or policy makers. As an example is the restaurant owner can know practically what is a favorite menu of customers so they need to condition it with the kitchen and logistics team, in the time span where most visitors come, how much net profit they get, and others only through a platform.
5) Resource Optimization
Every technology is basically to help human work, not to replace it as a whole. For example, the payroll system will help HR to make payroll more quickly and easily. Therefore, five HR staff who previously had to always work overtime to do the manual payroll calculation of 150 employees can now utilize their time and energy allocations to focus more on the objectives of improving the quality of the HR itself such as providing training, consulting, and so on.
The concept of system integration is the concept of a unitary whole system consisting of various small systems in it that are interrelated with one another. This causes increased cooperation between one work unit and another, accelerates the flow of information and data exchange between units, enables accessing data in real time, makes policy decisions easier and more practical, and optimizes and simplifies resources. Thus, in the end the integrated system will achieve the main goal of an information system, which is to provide the right information at the right time.
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