St. Mary?s Readies for Next Generation

Scribbled doctor’s signatures might become obsolete, or at least digitized on a computer screen, sometime in the near future.

Digitized signatures, e-mailed test results and patient wrist bands with bar-coded medicine records are all part of a $200 million, 18-hospital initiative by Sisters of Mercy Health System Inc. in St. Louis, the parent of Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas Inc. and its St. Mary’s Hospital in Rogers.

The Genesis Project, as it’s called, is a four-year project aimed at transforming work processes and information technology across the Mercy system. That includes having a centralized supply warehouse, electronic prescriptions, automated drug distribution and electronic patient records by 2007.

“The decision was made after looking at the industry, and all the medical errors and safety issues regarding patient care nationally,” said Ed Mirzabegian, chief operations officer for Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas.

George Flynn, interim CEO for Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas, said reduced administrative costs could be a by-product of the automation and streamlining efforts.

“By standardization and consolidation where appropriate, we can take some administrative costs out of the health care equation so we can reinvest into the clinical aspects of health care,” Flynn said.

St. Mary’s Hospital in Rogers is still in the schematic design phase of the 200-bed, 350,000-SF hospital, and its 150,000-SF clinic facility off Interstate 540 and New Hope Road that is set to open in 2007.

St. Mary’s has raised $20.5 million of its capital fundraising campaign, and the hospital hopes to reach its goal of $40 million by December 2005. The last donation came from the J.E. and L.E. Mabee Foundation in July for $1.5 million. Construction and funding aside, the system has already started making moves to ready for its new digs.

By November, St. Mary’s will start implementing the Bridge MedPoint patient safety software system. In addition to storing medication information, the system can store blood transfusion and lab specimen information. The system was introduced in 1999 and was designed to help nurses intercept clinical errors at the patient’s bedside.

Based on the current 153-bed St. Mary’s growing to 200 beds, the system will cost about $600,000 to implement, said Jamie Kelly, director of marketing for Bridge Medical. Kelly said Bridge Medical sold the software to the entire Mercy Medical system at the same time. The cost of implementing the system, she said, depends on the hospital’s total bed count, but can reach more than $1 million.

“It’s going to be automated and really take the guesswork out of it,” Mirzabegian said. “A lot of times if one of the components fails, the patient gets the wrong medication.”

The Institute of Medicine estimates that medication-related errors for hospitalized patients cost about $2 billion annually, and between 44,000 and 98,000 patients nationwide die from medical errors annually. The studies indicate that medical errors kill more people per year than breast cancer, AIDS or motor vehicle accidents.

But St. Mary’s isn’t the only one getting high-tech with patient medication.

Regional Tech-Savvy

Washington Regional Medical Center introduced a similar system in August made by intelliDOT Corp. of San Diego. Northwest Health System will begin a 60-to-90-day trial period with the same intelliDOT system in November.

Julie Cole, marketing manager for intelliDOT, said the cost of implementing her system is about $1,600 per bed. Northwest Arkansas, Cole said, happens to be home to two of only four hospitals nationwide that are using, or will soon be using, the two-year-old company’s software so far.

“Solutions abound, but not all are designed with the needs of nurses and patients in mind,” said Gerry Forth, president and CEO of intelliDOT. Inconsistency and high costs, keep most hospitals from investing in medication safety technology, Forth said.

“Studies have shown that bar code-based medication safety systems can reduce medication administration errors at the bedside by up to 90 percent,” Forth said. “To make it more personal, imagine your local hospital of, say, 100 beds. Each year, on average, about 13,000 medication errors of all types will occur there.”

Cole said intelliDOT offers their system at about one-third the cost of a Bridge-type system because it is simplified hardware and software, created by intelliDOT. Many more established systems have the software but might employ a company such as Casio Computer Co. to create the hardware. It’s designed to be compatible with an existing wireless network system, Cole said. In addition to the bar code, the intelliDOT system reads “iDOTs” or little symbols embedded in the bar code that pick up vitals like blood pressure.

Terry Fox, spokesperson for Washington Regional Medical Center, said the system is now operating “flawlessly,” and Washington Regional doesn’t plan on switching to anything else.

Electronic Records

In January, St. Mary’s will also begin scanning patient records in an effort to move toward its goal of being a “paperless” hospital by its new facility move-in date of July 2007. Northwest Heatlh System already has a system in place for scanning and transcribing patient records into the computer.

Cerner Corp. of Kansas City will provide the software for Mercy, which will differ from the Bridge software that will already be in place.

Cerner Corp. would not release the average cost of its system, although Tracy Richardson, a spokeswoman for Cerner, did say it has about 1,500 clients nationwide, mostly medical clinics and hospitals.

Richardson said St. Mary’s will implement nine Cerner Millenium software solutions that will unify its laboratory, radiology, surgery and clinical departments.

The Cerner software will end the need for a paper chart by making all patient records electronic and centralized.

Stephen Goss, physician executive of Mercy Medical Clinics, said the new system will eventually pay off financially.

“The return on your investment is probably the cost savings over time as opposed to really increasing your productivity over time,” Goss said. “In the end, it saves the clinic money, the pharmacy money and begins to reduce then the cost of health care. It starts cutting our costs by being able to electronically do those things.”

Goss said the Cerner system will enable him to make quicker decisions, because he won’t be sifting through a stack of paper in a chart.

“If a patient becomes chronically ill, that becomes a stack of paper you have to sift through,” Goss said. “On an electronic record, it will be there. You will just click on a tab, and there are your tests results.”

The software will produce a pop-up alert on the physician’s computer screen when test results are in, and the lab will immediately get orders for a test. It will also produce warnings for allergies or other pre-existing conditions.

“It will cut down on redundancy,” Goss said. “If another doctor has ordered something the day before, I don’t repeat that test, and I know what the results are. The efficiency is having all of that information readily available.”

The system isn’t foolproof. Goss admitted that some kinks will have to be worked out. Physicians won’t be able to use the helpful tabs with, for instance, a record that comes in from outside the Mercy System.

“Any chart information scanned into the computer will be there for viewing but you won’t be able to extract the data out of it,” Goss said,

St. Mary’s and the clinics will save money because it will speed up productivity, Goss said.

“I think just getting rid of that paper chart, it improves our efficiency doing things,” he said.