Stage 6 Caps Off Holy Family Memorial Medical Center's 20-Year Quality Mission
(8/5/2009)

As the latest MEDITECH hospital to achieve Stage 6 EMR recognition from HIMSS Analytics, Holy Family Memorial Medical Center (Manitowoc, WI) is seeing the results of its long-term efforts to provide top quality care to its patient community. Since implementing the MAGIC HCIS in 1989, the organization has seen many changes in the health care industry, yet has maintained its solid commitment to clinical excellence through sensible planning, and a persistent approach to technology adoption.

"We've enjoyed a wonderful 20-year partnership together with Holy Family, so it's extremely rewarding to see them achieve this level of recognition," says MEDITECH President and COO Howard Messing. "Holy Family is taking its rightful place among the most advanced clinical I.T. users in the country."

A Look Back: Securing Buy-in, from the Top Down
As the CIO and Director of Information Systems at Holy Family Memorial, Ed Bauknecht knows (perhaps better than anyone) that achieving meaningful success with I.T. is a long-term venture. One of his earliest steps in preparing the hospital for the impact of these technologies was to secure executive- and physician-level support from the very beginning.

"At the start of our I.T. initiatives, we knew we would need to encompass the entire continuity of care across all our facilities and clinics as well as speciality care and home care sites," Bauknecht says. "We were very fortunate to have a CMO and executive staff members who were committed to this project from the start. They made resources available when necessary and kept the focus on patient safety throughout the duration of our projects."

Several key physicians on staff were also instrumental in guiding other caregivers through the I.T. adoption and education process. "Our physician champions were heavily involved in the initial planning, communication, and implementation training procedures," says Bauknecht. "They communicated regularly with other departments, assisted with design and testing, and provided extensive training on the electronic medical record."

Because physicians were so actively involved, Holy Family Memorial's leaders saw other clinicians and staff members quicker to embrace I.T., and eager to help advance the facility's technology goals. "Keeping physicians happy and involved is extremely important when striving to become a Stage 6 hospital," says Bauknecht. "And since we do a lot of training on a regular basis, we were also able to provide our physicians with Continuing Medical Education credits. We wanted to make the point that time spent learning to use advanced I.T. tools is valuable, in and of itself. And that certainly hit home."

Tangible Benefits Keep Staff and Patients Loyal
In the years since first adopting the MEDITECH system, Holy Family Memorial has seen its quality of patient care improve tremendously. "Since our main focus has been on patient safety, we've been very pleased to see tangible benefits in our medication error rates," says Bauknecht. "Today, if a medication dose is too high or low, an alert appears to warn the nurse or physician who is ordering the medication. It's almost impossible to make a careless mistake, as with a paper chart."

The staff has also noticed a number of time-saving benefits as well. "Our documentation template feature has gotten an especially positive reception from our providers," says Bauknecht. "Being able to point-and-click quickly and easily within the system, physicians are finding themselves devoting more time to their patients and less time to the computer."

On the road to Stage 6, many hospitals often get stuck at Stage 5—the closed loop medication stage requiring Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), a pharmacy management system, and an electronic medication record with either bar coding or radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Holy Family Memorial pushed past this hurdle by bar coding data elements into its HCIS, ensuring that the Five Rights of medication administration are executed and monitored automatically.

"The use of bar code scanning definitely increases our caregivers' accuracy and efficiency when they're administering medications," explains Bauknecht. "Furthermore, it provides physicians with faster and simpler access to critical information about patients' past and present treatment history. With this perspective, they know the decisions they're making today are the safest and most logical ones for each individual patient."

Seeing Years of Dedication Pay Off
With 20 years of I.T. accomplishments behind them, and nearly 100% of all physicians now ordering electronically, Holy Family Memorial finds itself with a lot to be proud of. "We are thrilled that all of our regular employed physicians are now entering orders into the system," says Bauknecht. "Our 'visiting providers,' who are on-site only a few times each year, are still learning—but they get a lot of help from our staff clinicians."

For other hospitals hoping to achieve Stage 6, the folks at Holy Family Memorial stress the importance of having a long-range strategic plan and staying focused on the road ahead. In Bauknecht's eyes, even the economic downturn shouldn't discourage hospitals from getting started.

"Hospitals must be ready for change, but it's equally important to be able to stay the course throughout the entire process," says Bauknecht. "Achieving excellence is not so much a matter of having the most cutting-edge technologies, but rather a combination of many different factors that have a lot to do with just having the tenacity to see things through. Strong leadership, care continuity, dedicated physicians, and stable software—these are what you really need, and these are what got us to where we are today."

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