NASHVILLE, TN – During the Premier Breakthroughs conference on June 15, representatives from Providence Health & Services detailed the benefits of installing a collaborative perinatal wide area network (WAN) to connect the system’s five hospitals in southern California.
“It’s common knowledge that OB isn’t a big money-maker for hospitals,” said Sherri Mendelson, director of nursing research at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, Calif. “So when we showed our stakeholders that a site-tailorable perinatal WAN would save Providence about $200,000 compared to five independent site-tailorable systems at each facility, we got people’s attention.”
The implementation featured an unusual degree of planning and teamwork.
“The extra time we spent in the planning process actually made the implementation go faster,” said Ronda McPhail, the hospital’s labor and delivery manager. “And there was a genuinely collegial spirit throughout the whole process. That’s because it was something that neither the IT or clinical staff couldn’t have achieved alone. And on our nursing team, we made sure that the night shift had as much project input as the day shift.”
Providence is now adding neonatal ICU and post-partum documentation on the WAN. “With the WAN, we have a much louder voice with hospital management,” said Mendelson. “If the WAN goes down, all five hospitals’ vital perinatal information goes down.”
McPhail added that perinatal EMR data now flows both inbound and outbound to the hospital’s main EMR. “When the proprietary EMR and the specialty EMRs talk to each other, there are fewer errors and less risk of legal exposure,” she said. “Some of our veteran nurses occasionally reminisce about the days when they could ‘tell the patient’s story’ on a paper chart. But they acknowledge that the electronic system improves quality and regulatory compliance.”
“Nurses today need to be more IT-literate than ever before,” said Trevor McCaskill, western regional director of Premier’s informatics division, based in Portland, Ore. “We’re seeing more and more nurses getting informatics and IT degrees. Many jobs are now requiring a dual background in nursing and IT. Having tech-savvy nurses on key committees made the Providence WAN implementation much easier.”
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