Lourdes Hospital, a member of Catholic Health Partners, serves more than 18 counties in western Kentucky, southern Illinois and northwestern Tennessee. To enhance physician satisfaction, eliminate duplication of effort throughout inpatient clinical areas and to maintain a competitive edge, Lourdes implemented a secure, aggregated clinical portal for its physician community.
Lourdes, Paducah, Ky., needed to find a comprehensive solution that would complement its legacy health information system and one that would be interoperable with various existing ambulatory electronic medical records.
Lourdes' solution provider recognized that gaining the confidence of the physician population was contingent upon quickly providing a tangible pilot for deployment. They designed a three-phase implementation process to deliver early and ongoing value to the hospital and its constituents. First and foremost, clinical leadership was engaged to determine roll-out phases based on clinical need and key physician acceptance criteria.
From that point, they put into place the infrastructure required for aggregating clinical data from the hospital and physician offices, allowing participating physicians to access a longitudinal patient record through a Web-based portal product. By providing more breadth and depth of information at the point of care, Lourdes strengthened its competitive position and outdistanced its competitor.
Once the Lourdes pilot was under way, the implementation team worked with the solution provider and the leadership team to develop the continued roll-out strategy. The implementation team's continuous involvement with the physicians has reached an adoption rate of over 80% within approximately 10 months.
The next phase of the implementation is the rollout of additional functionality to keep the physicians engaged in continuous use of the solution. Within the next phase Lourdes will implement inpatient flow sheets to accumulate data for physicians to monitor, evaluate and treat their inpatients. As an added benefit, physicians will then be able to access this data from their office, home, or any location with an Internet connection. Thus far, successful implementation has significantly reduced duplicate manual documentation by nursing staff in the inpatient environment and increased physician/clinical staff satisfaction.
As growth continues and adoption is sustained the following phases will include disease and wellness dashboards to assimilate clinical results so that all physicians having contact with a patient are alerted of any existing medical conditions in order to manage appropriate protocols for delivering higher quality care. This will yield significant improvements in physician and patient satisfaction.
Lourdes now has the following capabilities:
- Inpatient specialty legacy systems deployed into a unified portal with single sign-on and contextual views of source system images.
- Integration of ambulatory EMR data in a physician's data vault with patient matching capabilities and data that can be exported to the hospital EMR.
- Complete viewable patient information that displays in user-specific views to accommodate physicians' data requirements and enhance clinical staff concentration.
- Ongoing addition of physicians and clinical areas.
- Aggregation of ambulatory EMR systems and other ancillary systems.
Lourdes is leading the way in clinical data exchange, building a cognitive tool to support physicians and other clinicians at the point of care. The solution combines demographic, admission, discharge and transfer information with clinical data from laboratory, microbiology, blood bank, pathology, inpatient and outpatient encounter summaries, discharge summaries, EKGs, clinical imaging, PACs, quality indicators, and other clinical documents and reports. As patients navigate through the local healthcare system, their healthcare information follows them from treatment setting to treatment setting.
Lourdes' implementation of the ICAre portal puts them on the road to meeting the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 mandate for “meaningful use” because it aggregates all major inpatient clinical systems, builds on legacy systems and streamlines patient data from disparate sources into a single, unified record, accessible by caregivers where and when they need it. This system also adds value to long-term investments in healthcare information technology by spanning existing systems to improve the clinical value of current technology, reduce costs, increase interdepartmental communication and improve the quality of care.
