Wake Forest University School of Medicine is noted for its innovations in medical and graduate student education. In 1968, the medical school established a Division of Allied Health Sciences and started the Physician Assistant Program. The school, after 12 years of offering a problem-based curriculum to one-fourth of each medical school class, began a new curriculum in 1998 that combines a small-group problem-solving approach, early clinical experience and new technology such as laptop and hand-held computers to access academic and clinical databases.

ISE recently spoke to Wake Forest Systems Analyst Michael Barrick about their approach to using EnterpriseSCHEDULE in the data center at the School of Medicine. Michael said that three years ago they were frustrated by the lack of support for their OpenVMS job scheduling system and decided to look for a new system that would support the large array of job scheduling needs they had. With two ES 47 Alpha machines and up to 10 remote Windows Workstation clients, they needed a scheduler that can handle a heavy workload.

“The scheduler "works excellent" and it has fulfilled the promise of being much more reliable than his previous job scheduling system.”

Michael Barrick
Wake Forest University

When they found that ISE offered a conversion utility to convert their hundreds of jobs to the new format, combined with more than two decades of experience, they decided to go with EnterpriseSCHEDULE. They then went about converting more than 500 jobs to EnterpriseSCHEDULE with the help of ISE's support staff.

The main function of the department is the processing of the IDX physician's billing system to generate reports and updating of billing records. Jobs are used to create daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports. Many processes are automated to log in automatically using DCL procedures. Other scheduled procedures include automated month end closing of the books, automated weekly claims production to insurance companies and remittance posting from carriers. Michael said that EnterpriseSCHEDULE has automated about 90% of the department's processing and currently he runs about 500-600 jobs.

Since he started using EnterpriseSCHEDULE he has had few problems and has only had to restart the scheduler once in 3 years. Finally, Michael commented that the scheduler "works excellent" and that it has fulfilled the promise of being much more reliable than his previous job scheduling system. He said that compared to his old job scheduler support, ISE’s support has been tremendous and eager to help.