Industry Spotlight:  CASE STUDY:The Tactical Truth of a CPOE Strategy

Source: http://www.bostonworkstation.com/downloads/docs/customer_related/Catholic%20Health%20East.310.pdf

Since the HITECH Act has offered financial incentives for hospitals that meet specific requirements by 2012, Catholic Health East (CHE) is even more motivated to get its CPOE capability up and running in six of its eight Meditech facilities. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is a process of electronic entry of medical practitioner instructions for the treatment of patients. Not only does this save doctor's time, but it improves quality of care, patient safety and satisfaction. But implementing a CPOE strategy takes more than the flip of a switch.

Based in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, CHE is a multi-institutional Catholic Health System. The System includes 34 acute care hospitals, four long-term acute care hospitals, 25 freestanding and hospital-based long-term care facilities, 14 assisted-living facilities, four continuing care retirement communities, eight behavioral health and rehabilitation facilities, 32 home health/hospice agencies, and numerous ambulatory and community-based health services. Catholic Health East facilities employ approximately 54,000 full-time employees.

Affecting the tactical plan for CHE's CPOE strategy is the concurrent upgrade of the MEDITECH information system in each facility. To ensure a consistent and accurate implementation, CHE needed to enter all data involved with the CPOE implementation into both MEDITECH 5.54 and 5.64 versions.

A critical step in the CPOE implementation was to standardize procedure names in MEDITECH so physicians need only use a pull-down menu to locate a procedure and easily send the instructions through the system. These orders will then be communicated over the network to the medical staff or to the departments (i.e., pharmacy, laboratory or radiology) responsible for fulfilling the order.

To manually reformat and accurately key in thousands of procedures in hundreds of categories could take several weeks. For example, in diagnostic imaging alone, there are ultrasound, MRI, CT scan and many more types of tests. Additionally, CHE planned to amend each procedure with a prefix of the common code of the category to make it easier for the physician to find the procedure they need. This change would sufficiently slow the implementation to potentially miss the benchmark for HITECH's financial incentives.

Tony Lettera, Meditech applications analyst, and his IT staff realized that trying to manually standardize the procedures across both versions of their MEDITECH systems would not only take far more time than they could spare, but manual data entry would also be fraught with inaccuracies. They chose to automate this critical project using Boston WorkStation from Boston Software Systems. Boston WorkStation is task automation software that allows healthcare organizations to automate thousands of common tasks, manage workflow and improve productivity.

"If it weren't for Boston WorkStation, we'd need 100 more people to accomplish what we set out to do," said Lettera. "In many ways, automation has been a key factor in our ability to move this critical CPOE implementation forward. The MEDITECH upgrade alone was a big project. Laying the CPOE implementation on top of that could have been a nightmare. Boston WorkStation made it all work quickly, easily and reliably."

Donna Karver, manager of Meditech Financial and Administrative Applications noted,  "Its easy to take for granted the tactical steps involved in executing a major technology initiative which has the potential to change the way healthcare is administered. It makes sense to stop and think about how we can accomplish these projects more efficiently. Automation has played an indispensable tactical role in our larger strategic initiative."

Having successfully saved countless man-hours by automating this CPOE project,  Lettera and his team are constantly looking for areas where automation can reduce time and provide accurate results. As part of the Meditech upgrade Lettera and his team needed to remove site codes on over 5,000 procedures as part of a reconciliation process. Using Boston WorkStation to automate the task, they built 280 procedures in only two hours.

Lettera also used Boston WorkStation to speed the copying and re-filing of 19,000 drug names into MEDITECH RXM. Doing this reconciliation by hand would take a staff person weeks of work. By automating this task, it took only four days with minimal human oversight.

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Talk to us! To discuss automation in your MEDITECH 5.6/6.0 environment or for more ideas using Boston WorkStation to automate time-consuming manual tasks, call us at 866-563-5105 or visit www.bostonworkstation.com.