The Paperless Hospital -- Really!

How Baptist Medical Center South built an all-electronic environment while bigger, more prestigious hospitals failed.

By Julia King

June 13, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Less than two years ago, cows grazed on the Jacksonville, Fla., site of Baptist Medical Center South (BMCS). Today, physicians at the brand-new hospital make their rounds toting wireless devices to check lab results, view X-rays, update charts, order prescriptions and send and receive e-mail.
At bedsides, nurses use wireless devices on wheels, or WOWs, to record progress notes and check doctors' orders. If they administer medicine or change a bandage, the supplies they use are electronically tracked and matched by bar code to individual patient records, enabling more accurate patient billing and automatic inventory replenishment.
What's conspicuously absent everywhere is paper. And for a busy hospital whose staff has just a few weeks of experience working in a totally electronic environment, the overall atmosphere is strikingly tranquil. The doctors and nurses seem completely confident and competent in their new digital workplace.
Yet digital by no means equals impersonal. Original artwork graces the walls, waiting rooms have the cozy feel of a private library, and lots of windows look out on the hospital's well-tended gardens.
You have to wonder: How did this small, 92-bed community hospital manage to succeed where larger and more prestigious hospitals have failed?
For example, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles pulled the plug on its $34 million electronic medical record (EMR) system after just three months in 2002 because staffers refused to use it. Nationwide, only about 6% of hospitals have computerized systems for doctors' orders.
"It's all about changing the culture," says BMCS CIO Roland Garcia.
Seize the Day


Chief Medical Officer Keith Stein and CIO Roland Garcia of BMCS Image Credit: Gene Bednarek/Silver Image

From the beginning, Garcia says, he and other hospital executives realized that they had a unique opportunity to build not just a new hospital, but an entirely new culture and health care delivery model that relies heavily on technology to enhance patient care and safety.
To seize that opportunity, they first had to secure the buy-in of the area's independent physicians, who have a choice of where to practice.
Before the ground had been broken, BMCS recruited a physician advisory board, which worked with cross-functional IT and operations teams on virtually every aspect of the hospital project, from choosing which technology to use to conducting exhaustive simulation testing in the months before the hospital opened on Feb. 16.
The teams spent months parsing the thousands of steps and processes involved in treating patients. Everything was dissected, from patient scheduling and clinical procedures to discharge and billing.

Ordering and filling a prescription,

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Business Process Management: Leveraging Competencies and Streamlining Processes to Achieve Operational Excellence
(Source: IBM) BPM is a business management practice that encompasses process automation, process modeling and simulation, process modularization and service orientation, process monitoring,...

BPM ROI calculator
(Souce: IBM) Content-rich processes, from opening a new account to customer billing, are central to day-to-day operations. These processes, however, tend to be...

Your Solution for Delivering and Optimizing Applications Across the Enterprise
Learn why a large US food processor chose Citrix NetScaler to securely deliver a new Oracle ERP solution to external partners and remote...

BPM Survey Results: The Real-World Analysis
(Source: IBM) Business Process Management (BPM)enables faster, more confident decision making, which results in more transactions conducted, which ultimately leads to more satisfied...

Application Delivery Solutions
Learn why a $6.5 billion international producer and marketer of alcoholic beverages chose Citrix NetScaler to increase Web app performance and ensure high...

Usability Is Everything
Learn what sets Workday's HR and Payroll solutions apart from the competition....

8 Must-Have Features to Handle All of Your Network Demands
The functionality you need in your next load balancer. Learn how you can replace your aging load balancer with a true web application...

The Value of Real SaaS at Workday
Cost savings, speed to value, and innovation brought to the enterprise by Workday's software-as-a-service solutions for HR and Payroll....

Accelerate SSL Encrypted Applications
The amount of SSL traffic is growing in the enterprise. Because it is encrypted, it cannot be properly controlled and accelerated. Blue Coat...

SaaS at Flextronics, Inc.
Dave Smoley, CIO of Flextronics, discusses the real value of software-as-a-service and why he chose Workday for his HR solution....

All White Papers | All Webcasts