Michigan officials have unveiled a new 170-acre community billed as "a new concept in providing care to patients."
Metro Health, a Grand Rapids-based healthcare provider, announced plans for the Metro Health Village on Thursday, with Metro Health Hospital at its center.
"No one knows exactly what shape healthcare reform will take," said Bill Lewkowski, executive vice president and CIO at Metro Health, "but what is clear to me is that the path to healthcare IT reform is through virtualization. From electronic medical records to physician collaboration to HIPAA compliance to IT costs, there are too many benefits to virtualization to ignore."
The new health community is a combination of support services, retail and restaurants with the Metro Health Hospital as the center, said Metro Health officials. Village staff consists of nearly 1,000 doctors and nurses that provide care to almost 11,000 patients each year. Clinical staff at the health community handle about 50,000 annual emergency room visits and 320,000 visits to outpatient centers.
Officials say the project was launched in 2007. During construction, they mandated that patient information be immediately accessible to authorized personnel across the campus, and even more widely through the Web.
"Healthcare is all about information," Lewkowski said. "That information has to move in real-time among team members coordinating care for a patient. It also has to move rapidly to the patient's location – from surgery suites to patient rooms to the front desk to the pharmacy, faster than a patient can be wheeled from one location to another."
Metro Health Hospital includes approximately 1,250 workstations to allow for point-of-care access to patient information. Each workstation contains a V90 thin client, developed by Wyse Technology, and is embedded with Windows XP. Wyse Device Manager is being leveraged at the hospital and throughout the village to manage the thin clients for asset management, configuration management, diagnostics and firmware updates for thin clients and supported smart devices.
Metro Health thin client users work with hundreds of applications, said officials, including EPIC electronic medical record and clinical systems, iSite digital radiology, and other applications that address patient management, billing and administrative needs.
