Hospitals

PacMed adopts a real-time locating system to improve processes, safety and the bottom line.

The care needs and documentation required to meet today’s healthcare standards compel caregivers to expect more time and information from patients and processes than ever before. While there are tools to help make documentation easier, healthcare has traditionally lacked a good system to allow caregivers to “right-size” time with patients.

As part of a two-phased project in 2009, Harrisonburg, Virginia-based Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH) set out to improve its clinical documentation process, implementing advanced speech-recognition technologies. Even though speech-recognition technology was not new to RMH, the hospital sought to find a new solution that would improve medical-transcription (MT) and clinical-documentation processes.

The primary care physician (PCP) refers a patient to a specialist; the specialist treats the patient and then sends the patient and a report back to the PCP. It’s a simple process, but for most organizations it actually comprises a number of steps that make for a complex work flow for facilities, clinicians and patients.

Several years ago, North Shore-LIJ Health System, which cares for people of all ages throughout Long Island, Queens and Staten Island, established a strategy for information technology to implement enterprise solutions allowing for sharing of patient information across hospitals. In radiology, that has led to the installation of highly integrated, multi-vendor products which provide a robust and highly redundant technology environment.

It is well known that most hospitals, regardless of size, deploy some type of digital imaging. As medical imaging continues to advance, hospitals must deal with the significant increase in data that is acquired and must be managed. Accordingly, almost all facilities are in one of three stages: leveraging a complete digital picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) solution, in the midst of deploying a digital PACS solution, or considering moving to a complete digital PACS solution. Therefore all hospitals are either implementing, have implemented, or are contemplating the implementation of a PACS solution that will enable their facility to efficiently manage complicated issues from large volume data storage to image distribution, work-flow efficiency, scalability and disaster recovery in a fiscally manageable way. Complicating the matter, many institutions necessitate a system that can manage all of these issues over multiple work sites with seamless coordination between clinical and information technology staff.

With all the talk about electronic medical records and meaningful use, it’s easy to put health information exchanges (HIEs) on the back burner. But that’s not an option. Communicating in a digital healthcare world without HIEs is like trying to navigate a highway system with no freeways.

 

Comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date and accessible information on healthcare providers is a key to successful healthcare business management. Most organizations, however, have neither accurate nor up-to-date information on their providers. Moreover, information that is captured is contained in multiple silos, reduced to paper files, rarely shared and never used to control costs.

The transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 – mandated to occur by Oct. 1, 2013, for organizations subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – is expected to improve care-management quality and enhance reimbursement accuracy. The transition, however, is expected to be costly and labor intensive; the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates the cost to providers alone at $3 billion through 2017.