Screen scraping is unreliable. Why would we use Boston Software Systems for our integration with our current system or a different EHR/HIS?

The complaint of unreliability is rooted in history. In the case of screen scraping, this history stretches back to when screen based workflow scripting meant reading a data stream from a mainframe. The easiest to implement, and therefore most widely used approach, was to parse these data streams by simple position. This meant that the addition or removal of even a single character would cause the parsing to return invalid data. Boston Software Systems recognized this fundamental flaw over two decades ago, and created workflow scripting technology that would interpret an emulation screen the way a user would, by reading and reacting to content. Today, there are many more user interface types beyond terminal emulation: windows, web browser, java and all of these can be deployed through Citrix or similar technology.  Like any technology, it is possible to implement screen scraping today in an unreliable way; similar to the past, the easiest approach to implement is a positional oriented approach. Here again, Boston Software Systems recognizes the problem and provides our customers with technology to interpret screens the way a user does – by reading and reacting to content.

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