Keeping records, notating charts and deciphering handwriting has just gotten easier for health care workers at Piedmont Medical Center and Piedmont's Fayette Community Hospital. The hospitals have begun phasing in online medical records and systemwide accessibility for providers.
Only 5 percent of the hospitals in the United States currently have an integrated program accessible and used for daily care of patients that includes online charting, orders and medical test review.
"This is about patient safety and effective health care delivery," said Colleen O'Connell, director of the QUEST project at Piedmont Medical Center. She cited a study conducted several years ago by The Leapfrog Group, an organization of nearly 150 public and private groups that provide health care benefits. The study reported that tens of thousands of deaths each year in the health care arena are preventable.
According to its Web site, the group works with medical experts around the country to identify problems and propose solutions for consumers and health care providers, focusing on the quality of certain aspects of care, such as medication issues and medical tests.
"At Piedmont Hospital, approximately 300,000 patients are treated each year and over 3 million medication doses are administered annually, or 8,800 daily," O'Connell said, "but mistakes do happen.
"What's important is what we do to prevent them from happening. QUEST can help with that prevention."
Piedmont began the process by creating teams of physicians in all specialties to discuss strategies and develop an implementation program. Areas being addressed include patient orders, test results and physician notes.
Eventually, all results, orders and clinical documentation will be handled through a computer, helping remove the human factors of reading difficult handwriting or garbled tape-recorded doctors' notes, for example.
All necessary providers, including nurses, occupational therapists and physical therapists, will have access to online patient information once the system is in place and training has been completed. They will be able to pull up the information from the hospital or at home, in case of an emergency. Record review is password-protected; the individual's password works as a signature each time a record is accessed.
Patients will benefit from this new system as well. For example, medical records generally require a time-delayto be researched and physically brought from storage. With the online system, the records — including medical history, earlier test results and even X-rays and MRI results — will be available with the click of a mouse.
"The work done in a hospital is among the most complex in the world and this will affect anyone who works here and anyone who comes to the hospital," O'Connell said. The system will be phased in over time.
"The challenge for us is internal acceptance. It is requiring a great deal of process-review, analyzing the way work currently gets done, developing standardization and enlisting lots of input — to assure that everyone is comfortable with the system.
"It will make our work easier and more effective; it will reduce human errors and it will change the way we deliver care," O'Connell said. "This is huge for us and for our patients."