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Winners of this year’s Most Wired–Small and Rural Award found creative ways around the resources hurdle to make the most of their IT systems. Some did it by joining together in regional IT affiliations, others by being part of a larger urban system, and some the old-fashioned way—on their own. Still others achieved their goals by working hand-in-hand with a big IT vendor.
From Health Care's Most Wired Case Studies
On the other side of the country, St. Peter’s Hospital has taken a path 180 degrees apart from DeWitt by deciding that going it alone was the best approach. While that step ensured its independence, it also meant the hospital had to purchase its IT on its own. The 99-bed, stand-alone facility built its IS department from the ground up, using the clinical information system offered by Meditech, Westwood, Mass.
Dan Sullivan, St. Peter’s director of information services, says the hospital takes a step-by-step approach to rolling out system components. The approach is done in two phases—implementing the technology, and then optimizing it for the hospital’s needs—as part of a rolling three-year strategy.
“The three-year rolling strategy is our best attempt to balance time, people and dollars,” Sullivan says. “It’s really our road map of what we implement, how we implement it and when we implement it.”
So far, St. Peter’s has installed and optimized a number of Meditech’s modules: communitywide scheduling for the hospital and clinics, patient registration, and back office functions such as billing, purchasing, budgeting and forecasting. In addition, modules are up and running for the EHR, OR management, imaging, lab and pharmacy. Nurse clinical documentation, patient care management—basically the liaison between doctors and nurses—and a data repository for data mining and quality measurement and reporting have been implemented but not yet fully optimized.
These advanced installations carry a sizeable price tag. As luck would have it, St. Peter’s is in the midst of new construction that will replace much of the existing hospital. While the hospital
reports that the IT budget accounts for 3.5 percent of the hospital’s total capital budget, the way that it’s accounted for folds much of the IT expenses into the budget for construction of the new facility, and network setup, connectivity and infrastructure are part of the construction capital budget.
A new building gave Sullivan and his team a chance to create a leading-edge IT plan from scratch, and he had a lot of say in the planning. “You really do have an opportunity to take a huge step forward,” he says. “We build the business case associated with a payback on the functionality, although IS doesn’t make a decision to purchase, and we have a lot of input.”
If a small hospital decides to go it alone in the IT world, Sullivan suggests focusing on foundations, meaning that there are certain things that need to be done before others. Even though those foundation elements aren’t always the most exciting items, without them an IT implementation can’t optimize the parts that are glitzy and glamorous, he says. For example, if nursing clinical documentation isn’t done before moving on to providing physicians with an EHR, there’s a whole patient care piece missing.
“If you look at your workflow and your processes, there’s a natural order in which things should be implemented,” he says. “Avoid jumping to the glamorous. Make sure your infrastructure and foundation are solid.” |
