ACD Initiative Reaches Milestone
During the most recent Acute Care Documentation retreat, BWH’s Christine Perino, RRT, was excited at the scenario unfolding before her. Volunteers from BWH and MGH were acting out a scenario following a fictional female patient through her plan of care, which involved nearly a dozen clinicians from multiple departments.
Acute Care Documentation, is an electronic platform that enables multiple caregivers to access the patient record, including flowsheets, assessments and notes, both onsite and remotely.
“To be able to have all your patient’s information accessible through one program will bring health care to another level, and our patients deserve that,” said Perino, a clinical supervisor in Respiratory Care. “The ability to bring together every aspect of a patient’s illness will truly change everyone’s experience and facilitate collaboration across disciplines.”
Perino was one of about 250 clinicians from BWH and MGH who committed many hours this spring to identify, evaluate and coordinate the development of a shared inpatient electronic medical record system that will transition the two hospitals from paper to electronic documentation systems.
“The development and implementation of an interdisciplinary electronic inpatient documentation system will be a transformative process for our organizations,” said Denise Goldsmith, MS, MPH, RN, manager of BWH Nursing Informatics and project leader for Patient Care Services. “Successfully carrying out a major change process such as this is dependent on the involvement of the people most affected by the potential change. We are extremely fortunate to have commitment for the project by a broad representation of BWH/MGH clinicians. They have shown, through the accelerated design sessions, their enthusiasm, attention to detail and willingness to approach this process with an underlying framework of interdisciplinary collaboration. For all of us the primary objective of this work is to improve the quality of care we provide our patients by improving the manner in which we capture our work in the patients’ health record.”
Retreat participants had the opportunity to see how MetaVision, the clinical documentation software, integrates with the clinical workflow and utilizes data from other clinical systems within the Partner’s Information System network. Much of the clinical data entered into Metavision will be coded so that it can be re-used by clinicians and used for quality reporting purposes.
Acute Care Documentation is slated to be piloted at both hospitals near the end of 2010, beginning at BWH with Tower 11 and Tower 3BC. For more information regarding the Acute Care Documentation Project at BWH, please contact Denise Goldsmith by e-mail at dgoldsmith@partners.org.