IS Initiatives Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
Partners and BWH Information Systems have many projects in development, in pilot or roll out stages, all aimed at improving patient care and safety, as well as clinician workflow.
Hundreds of clinical and IS staff have been involved in the BWH and MGH Acute Care Documentation project, an electronic platform that enables multiple caregivers to document the patient record, including flowsheets, assessments and notes, on site and remotely. ACD is slated to be piloted at BWH and MGH in spring 2011. Plans at BWH call for the pilot to begin on Tower 11 and Tower 3BC.
The following is a brief summary of several other projects.
HouseCalls/Televox
Many BWH and BWPO ambulatory practices are seeing a reduction in no-show rates and the ability to redeploy staff resources, thanks to Televox HouseCalls automated appointment reminders. In one month, the system placed nearly 60,000 calls at a success rate of 96 percent.
HouseCalls was rolled out to 81 practices with 143 scheduling locations in October and November of last year, and already it is demonstrating a significant cost savings potential. Projected over a full year, HouseCalls could save BWH an estimated $200,000 by eliminating mailed reminders and more than 11,000 staff hours. The system draws scheduling data from BICS, IDX and IDX Rad.
Phase two of the HouseCalls roll out continues, and when complete, it will be utilized in 145 practices.
Surgical Suite Integration with Faulkner
IS has enhanced the surgical scheduling systems at Faulkner Hospital to provide improved integration with the BWH system. Staff at the two facilities now have access to the same scheduling platform, which has improved scheduling efficiencies and OR turn-around times. Surgeons and staff now can submit requests for OR time through one integrated system, whether they are requesting time for an OR at FH or BWH.
Research Pharmacy
Research Pharmacy is scheduled to go live this summer with a state-of-the-art program that will improve the way patients enrolled in drug trials or studies have their study medications managed by the Investigational Drug Service (IDS). This new program will end IDS’ reliance on complex paper records and improve patient safety by linking and tracking the patients enrolled in approximately 300 study protocols, the physicians ordering the medication and the pharmacists who are manufacturing and dispensing these drugs. It will allow the research pharmacists to track all these steps, including administration for inpatients and prescription refills for patients participating from home, and enable researchers to produce reports for study sponsors or regulatory agencies accurately and efficiently.
Mobile EHR Pilot Launched
Partners IS has developed a mobile electronic health record application, mEHR, and launched a pilot in April with 100 physicians at BWH, MGH, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Partners Continuing Care.
The initial technology decisions, architecture and application development for mEHR started in early January 2010 after the PHS IS Clinical Operations group chartered a pilot mobile viewer. Version 1 patient data includes demographics, problems, medications, allergies and adverse reactions, procedures, vital signs, lab results from chemistry, hematology, immunology and blood bank, discharge summaries, operative notes, notes from Radiology, Pathology, Cardiology, Endoscopy, Pulmonary, Microbiology and LMR notes. Users can also review the members of the patients’ inpatient care team.
The pilot got underway with iPhones and the iPAD, and plans are in place to add Blackberry Bold and Curve models in June.
Hosted Computing Model for Application Delivery
The goals of this project are to increase clinician productivity and satisfaction by providing faster access to applications; to more quickly and flexibly extend applications to business affiliates; and to increase worker productivity by providing a consistent method of accessing applications from different locations and types of computing devices.
This is a major, multi-year undertaking to develop the platform that will allow application sessions to follow clinicians from one device to another. The platform would run applications on servers located in Partners’ data centers rather than on desktop PCs and laptops. In this environment, applications can continue to run as the clinician moves from device to device or location to location, eliminating the need to reload applications repeatedly over the course of a day. Applications would not need to be installed on each PC, making it easier to extend Partners applications to devices it does not manage, such as clinicians’ homes or business affiliate locations.
For more information about these projects, contact Sue Schade, BWH CIO.