Our Latest
Stage 6 Customer: Caritas Christi Health Care
Strong leadership and lessons learned hold the key to
Caritas Christi's enterprise-wide success with MEDITECH's
Advanced Clinicals.
After
successfully launching an organization-wide initiative to
implement MEDITECH's Advanced Clinical System, Caritas Christi
Health Care has yet another feather to add to its cap: Stage 6
EMR Recognition from HIMSS Analytics. As the largest
community-based hospital network in New England, Caritas was
proud to receive recognition for its six facilities, all located
in Eastern Massachusetts. In addition to the Stage 6
recognition, all six sites have also achieved full Leapfrog
compliance.
Caritas began their journey to Stage 6 designation in 2006, with
its ambitious plans to adopt the Advanced Clinicals—including
Physician Care Manager (PCM) and Patient Care and Patient Safety
(PCS)—across its entire enterprise.
"Our goals for this project were always to improve patient
safety and care delivery," says Todd Rothenhaus, MD, senior
vice president and chief information officer for the Caritas
organization. "Although achieving Stage 6 recognition is
certainly an honor for us, it was more of an afterthought that
we realized we had met the requirements."
Leading the Way to Improved Outcomes
Caritas' pro-I.T. culture springs from the belief that I.T.
improves patient care and outcomes, a belief which started at
the very top. "Ralph de la Torre, our CEO, is a true
visionary," Rothenhaus says. "He has been touting the
benefits of I.T. for years, and he continued to commit financial
resources to our Advanced Clinical project even when the economy
took a bad turn in 2008."
Although the Caritas management team steered the Advanced
Clinicals project, they weren't looking to designate the install
as an I.T. project. Instead, they wanted to empower clinicians
who would be using the system, to help build and implement it.
To achieve this, Caritas appointed a project management
team—with representation from nursing, pharmacy, and the
medical staff—to oversee the initiative at all six Caritas
sites.
"This core group of individuals was crucial to our
success," says Rothenhaus. "Because of their
preparation, organization, and hard work, we never missed a LIVE
date by more than a week from our initial projections."
The project management team implemented PCS and Bedside
Verification (BV) first, bringing all six Caritas sites LIVE in
under a year and a half. They applied lessons learned, such as
preparing for the impact PCS has on Pharmacy, to the next leg of
the implementation, CPOE. As a result, the team went LIVE with
MEDITECH's CPOE solution at all six facilities in only a year's
time, and are now seeing four out of the six Caritas hospitals
at a greater than 80% CPOE utilization.
"As each site went LIVE, we learned what worked and then
applied those lessons at the next hospital," says Justine
Carr, MD, chief medical officer for Caritas. "Even now, our
system is still a work in progress, because we are always
reevaluating what works and what doesn't in the LIVE
environment. We have an ongoing dialogue with our frontline
staff and leadership to ensure their feedback is heard and
addressed."
Looking Ahead to the Next Stage, Meaningful Use
In addition to the Advanced Clinicals project, Caritas is in the
process of going completely paperless, and setting their sights
on Stage 7. Of course, Meaningful Use is on their minds, but
Rothenhaus isn't too worried about their ability to meet the
Stage 1 requirements.
"With no gaps in our I.T. utilization, we're feeling pretty
confident about Meaningful Use," he says. "Our project
management team did such a great job with the Advanced Clinicals
project, we think we are in good shape."