Halifax
Health's Multi-Year EHR Initiative 'eHalifax' Leads to Stage
6 Achievement
(3/10/2010)
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.
MEDITECH
Medical
Information Technology, Inc.
MEDITECH Circle
Westwood, MA 02090
781-821-3000
www.meditech.com