LibertyHealth, a two-hospital health system in northern New Jersey, has rolled out an electronic health record system for its emergency departments.
LibertyHealth tapped Livingston, N.J.-based EDIMS, LLC, a provider of interoperable emergency department information management systems for hospitals, for the new technology. The hospitals have deployed EDIMS' nursing documentation and charge capture systems to help improve care quality and streamline operations, hospital executives said.
LibertyHealth, which implemented EDIMS' computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and physician documentation module last March, now has a complete EHR in its emergency departments. The EDs at LibertyHealth's Jersey City Medical Center and Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in Secaucus receive more than 100,000 patient visits per year.
With so much pressure on these EDs, LibertyHealth needed an information system that would speed up nursing documentation and ensure compliance with regulations. EDIMS' electronic main grid features numerous alerts, so nurses can see the status of patients and potential bottlenecks at a glance. The technology provides a single-view order screen that includes everything a nurse needs to process orders without switching to other screens.
"Our ED nurses played an essential role in choosing the nursing documentation module to add to LibertyHealth''s other successful EDIMS platforms," said Joe Scott, president and CEO of LibertyHealth. "When we saw how the EDIMS system automatically populated the billing system through the nurse documentation, we were sold."
"In light of the national movement toward automating healthcare records, our goal was to have a complete EHR to facilitate a more productive ED," Scott added.
Because nurses handle so much of the work in emergency departments, the ability to document what they do quickly and efficiently is the key to making EDs safer for patients and more financially sustainable for hospitals, said Shane Hade, chief executive officer of EDIMS.
