@font-face { font-family: "Cambria Math"; }@font-face { font-family: "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }
Two healthcare systems, one in Delaware and the other in Virginia, will be picking up their 2010 HIMSS Davies Organizational Awards of Excellence when HIMSS meets for its annual conference Feb. 20-24 in Orlando, Fla.
Delaware-based Nemours, a healthcare system for children that also operates in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida, and Virginia-based Sentara Healthcare will receive the awards in recognition of their effective use of information technology to improve safety and quality of patient care.
As Gina Altieri sees it, the award truly belongs to the physicians and staff. “For 10 years, we have been creating a new level of quality patient care with NemoursOne,” said the vice president for corporate services at Nemours. NemoursOne is the health system’s electronic health record.
Nemours operates the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and children’s specialty clinics in Delaware, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Nemours will establish a new full-service children’s hospital in Orlando in 2012. Nemours’ KidsHealth.org is billed as the world’s most visited pediatric healthcare website for parents, kids and teens.
Nemours employs more than 4,100 people, including 430 pediatric physicians, specialists and surgeons who cared for almost a quarter of a million children in 2009.
All Nemours clinics and its hospital are linked to NemoursOne. Nemours Children’s Hospital in Central Florida will be online when it opens in 2012.
NemoursOne, in combination with its data warehouse, has developed a streamlined medication reconciliation process with an outpatient system-wide rate currently at 88 percent.
“Our first commitment is to the care and safety of our patients,” said David E. Milov, MD, chief medical information officer at Nemours. “Without the engagement of our physicians, the commitment of our entire organization and the investment we made in creating a strong foundation, this achievement would not have been possible and our patients would not have reaped the benefits of safe, quality care.”
Milov said the Davies Award represents “a great validation of the work Nemours does for our patients.”
Sentara Healthcare
Sentara operates more than 100 sites, including eight acute care hospitals with a total of 1,935 beds and six outpatient care campuses.
Epic is deployed to 11,000 desktops using Citrix 4.5 running on x86 OS platform. Its Citrix farm includes 70 dedicated servers for the eCare environment. Using Citrix servers allows quick additional capacity without software loads on individual desktops, Sentara executives say.
Sentara began hospital implementation of its electronic health record system, Sentara eCare, in 2008. Sentara Medical Group physicians use Sentara eCare and more than 30,000 residents now use the Sentara myChart patient portal to communicate with physicians, schedule appointments, request refills and view test results.
“We have long believed in the effective use of technology to improve patient care,” said Bert Reese, vice president and CIO for Sentara Healthcare. “Sentara eCare was a collaboration of our best clinical minds and our best technology experts coming together to ensure that the final product would work for the benefit of patient care.”
Reese said Sentara eCare enables clinicians to engage patients in their own care. It has also resulted in a reduction in average length of stay for patients, a reduction in hospital readmission rates, shortened length of time from admission to bed assignments and decreased times from medication orders to administration and prevented more than 100,000 potential medication errors, according to Reese.
Sentara also boasts an 87 percent computerized physician order entry rate.
“Our entire clinical team has embraced the use of Sentara eCare as a way to do their jobs better,” said Reese.
“In addition to helping other organizations by documenting best practices, organizations that apply for Davies Awards have a powerful tool for recognizing the effort that the staff of their organization expends to implement and support an EHR," said Tom Smith, chairman of the HIMSS Organizational Davies Award Committee and CIO at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Ill., a 2004 Davies Award winner.
