Five physician informaticists and four healthcare organizations are winners of the 2008 Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems' Physician-Computer AMDIS Awards for excellence and achievement in applied medical informatics.
The awards will be presented July 16 at the 17th Annual AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection Symposium in Ojai, Calif.
The winners reflect "an explosion of applied medical informatics in the world," said AMDIS President William Bria, chief medical information officer of Shriners Hospitals for Children system, Tampa, Fla. For the second straight year, AMDIS has presented an award to an institution outside the U.S.
As healthcare IT advances, the award winners increasingly reflect achievement beyond the installation of a single application, Bria said.
"These are guys who have actually moved an organization," Bria said. "The good news is that our lifelong vision of trying to get healthcare using systems is starting to happen, but the interoperability issue hasn't gone away," he said. "You've got all this stuff out there, but it's not talking to one another." The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology "needs to be more insistent and go beyond a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval and say it must exchange, it must connect," referring to IT systems.
The individual winners are:
- Michael Zia is the chief medical officer and vice president of quality management at Decatur (Ill.) Memorial Hospital. Zia was charged with leading the implementation and adoption of a computerized physician order-entry system at the 204-bed community hospital.
- Peter Lindenauer is an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and the medical director of clinical information systems at the three-hospital Baystate Health system in Springfield, Mass. Lindenauer was cited as "the driving force to encourage over 2,000 physicians to embrace technology," including computerized physician order entry, the development of 60 clinical guidelines and 700 order sets.
- Roger Haley, a medical informaticist since 1981, is a nephrologist and a physician champion at the 303-bed Kaweah Delta Health Care District in Visalia, Calif. Haley has served as director of medical informatics and chairman of the medical informatics community for the district, and he is working to create a management-services organization with a local physicians foundation for a two-county, regional health information organization.
- Mark Smith serves as the chairman of the emergency department and Craig Feied was then-director of medical informatics at 844-bed Washington (D.C.) Hospital Center where they developed Azyxxi, a cross-application electronic healthcare information access platform that was purchased by Microsoft Corp. in 2006 and renamed Amalga. Feied and Smith led an effort to roll out the system at six other hospitals in the MedStar Health system based in Columbia, Md.
Group or organizational winners are:
- The clinical informatics team at 220-bed Concord (N.H.) Hospital, whose members include Joel Berman, chief medical information officer, and fellow physicians Paul Clark, Wendy Angelo and David Picard. Established in 2003, the team has been engaged in "continuously customizing Concord Hospital's outpatient" electronic medical record that is used by nine physician offices owned by the hospital as well the hospital-affiliated Dartmouth-Hitchcock Concord multispecialty clinic that provides care to 150,000 patients.
- Riverside Health System, Newport News, Va., began investing in an EMR system for its physician group in 1996, but the five-hospital system was honored for its homegrown, Web-based medication-reconciliation application, RxConcile, a project led by Chief Medical Officer Barry Gross and Director of Medical Informatics Charles Frazier.
- Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network, Allentown, Pa., is a two-hospital system cited for its implementation of a suite of intensive-care, anesthesia-management and decision-support systems across its ICU, operating room and emergency departments "to make this continuum as seamless as possible" for critical-care and anesthesia clinicians. The hospital uses data from the system to generate scheduled antibiotic administration reports and provide staff feedback on departmental Web sites. Compliance with antibiotic timing guidelines rose from 62% to 92% in the first six months and is now running at 95%, according to background information provided to AMDIS.
- Bumrungrad International Hospital, a 554-bed private tertiary hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, is the foreign winner this year. Bumrungrad is the largest private hospital in Southeast Asia, attracting 1.2 million patients a year, including 430,000 international patients. Eight years ago, after scrapping a pieced-together clinical IT system, Bumrungrad contracted with Bangkok-based Global Care Solutions, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, to install its enterprise system that includes patient registration, patient and bed management, laboratory, radiology, picture archiving and communication systems, pathology, pharmacy, other clinical, financial, materials management and human resources systems.
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