Just For the Record

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Time was, you'd be hard-pressed to find many healthcare organizations on the InformationWeek 500 list.

Not anymore. After an admittedly slow start in adapting to the electronic information age, healthcare is making up for lost time - to the benefit of patients and the clinicians who treat them.

The most recent edition of InformationWeek's annual listing of IT innovators honors several healthcare networks for their ambitious electronic medical record systems. Here's a closer look at three of them: Sparrow Health System, Lifespan and Penn Medicine. 

Transformation Journey
InformationWeek acknowledged Sparrow Health System, of Lansing, MI, for laying the groundwork and foundation to virtually reinvent its IT structure.

"It was very exciting," vice president and CIO Thomas Bres said of placing 22nd on the prestigious list. "We've been on a transformation journey in IT for a few years now."

After selecting Epic Systems as its partner in 2008, Sparrow began implementing its EMR system. As of this writing, Sparrow has achieved a total electronic medical record in 16 of its physician practices. The ultimate goal: a system-wide total EMR.

"We had to overhaul the entire networking and wireless infrastructure we had in nearly all our facilities, including four hospitals, 20-plus physician practices, and many lab and ancillary locations," Bres explained. "We had to update our infrastructure to handle the increased bandwidth and flow of information to implement an EMR system."

Patient Empowerment
Of all the new system's attributes, Bres seems most proud of a patient-empowerment application called iSparrow.

"One guiding principle we established when we launched this project was that every decision we made, every design point of the application, had to be done with the patient at the center of that design," Bres said. "You want to enable patients to be more active participants in the care process."

A physician within the Sparrow system echoed that point in a conversation with Bres. "One of the things you realize right away is that the record doesn't belong to the physician anymore," this doctor told Bres. "It's not just for physician notes and comments. It's now a patient record that travels with patients from the physician's office to the emergency department to the hospital."

IT to the RESCQ
Lifespan, a healthcare network based in Providence, RI, has a full functioning lifetime clinical record with a clinicians' portal in front of it. All three of its acute care hospitals have achieved HIMSS level 6 and successfully attested for stage 1 of meaningful use.

What really grabbed the folks at InformationWeek, though, is Lifespan's disaster preparedness system, called the Rapid Emergency Satellite Communications system, or RESCQ.

RESCQ is a portable, self-contained communications system that uses satellite technology and allows telephone, radio and computer communication to continue in the event normal communication channels fail.

"We had considered the problems health systems had in communicating during Katrina," David Hemendinger, a Lifespan vice president and its chief technology officer, began. "RESCQ came out of a need for clinicians and administrators to access our clinical systems while out in the field during disaster situations."

With easily navigable graphics, RESCQ "can be deployed in 15 minutes by any lay person to provide complete communication capabilities from anywhere in the field without having to rely on the standard commercial infrastructure," he said.

'Backbone' for HINI Clinics
As a satellite-based system, RESCQ offers immediate access to the Internet, to telephone systems, pagers and radio systems, as well as to Lifespan's own Enterprise clinical system.

"Lifespan designed and built 22 RESCQ palettes for use throughout Rhode Island," Hemendinger said. "Sixteen palettes went to other hospitals. The rest went to state and local emergency agencies."
 

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