Our
Latest Stage 6 Customer: Halifax Health
Thanks to a robust HCIS and a multi-year plan
for going electronic, Halifax Health's two
facilities have reached this important EHR
milestone.
Halifax
Health has long viewed its electronic health
record efforts more as a journey than a
destination. Six years ago, the organization
first developed its initial EHR strategy, known
as eHalifax—a multi-year plan which its
leaders review and update each year with new
target goals. Today, Halifax Health Medical
Center (Daytona Beach, FL) and Halifax Health
Medical Center of Port Orange (Port Orange, FL)
are seeing the fruits of their labors, as they
both join the growing list of MEDITECH hospitals
to achieve Stage 6 Electronic Medical Record (EMR)
Recognition from HIMSS Analytics.
"We're so proud to see our facilities among
the top hospitals nationwide for EMR adoption,"
says Lori DeLone, CIO for Halifax Health. She
notes that having support from the top down was
one of Halifax's key strategies to keep their
efforts on track.
"One of the greatest challenges we have had
is creating and maintaining a 'stay the course'
culture, both with clinicians and executive
leadership," she says. "It's easy to be
distracted by unexpected changes in both internal
and external business conditions, but it made a
big difference to have our entire executive team
on board with our EMR efforts, from the very
beginning." She adds that Halifax Health's
executives still meet every other month to review
their status and set new priorities.
Selling the Benefits of I.T.
The eHalifax roadmap has already reached some
important milestones, including implementation of
MEDITECH's Bedside Verification (BV) technology.
"BV has had a tremendous impact on our
patients' perceptions of safer care," says
DeLone. "And it is one of the projects that
truly 'sold itself' to our clinicians. It
benefits the nurse from day one, by reducing
documentation requirements and alerting them to
potential errors."
One vital criterion for Stage 6 organizations is
full physician documentation in at least one
patient care service area. Halifax Health
addressed this by having its pediatric
intensivists be the first to implement CPOE, and
also start electronically entering progress notes
via Physician Documentation. The group was
selected by Halifax Health's Chief Medical
Information Officer (CMIO) Dr. Ed Milcarsky, who
studied several deployment approaches and
selected the pediatric intensive care unit as the
pilot for CPOE. In addition, Dr. Milcarsky worked
closely with these physicians to ensure the
technology matched their clinical workflows.
"If I had to identify the single most
important critical success factor in our Level 6
achievement, it would be having a CMIO on staff,"
says DeLone. "Dr. Milcarsky has been
instrumental in setting the vision here at
Halifax for the Advanced Clinicals."
Planning for a Paperless Future
Now that they've achieved Stage 6, Halifax is
working toward getting all hospital-based
physicians ordering electronically by the fall of
2010. And as the hospital continues to replace
manual processes with an automated clinical
workflow, it looks forward to a paperless future.
Stay tuned for more updates on Halifax Health's
eHalifax journey, including CMIO-level strategies
for achieving clinical technology adoption, in
the months ahead.