Swedish Covenant Hospital (Chicago, IL) recently became MEDITECH's first MAGIC customer to achieve the prestigious Stage 6 Electronic Medical Record adoption recognition from HIMSS Analytics. Among Swedish Covenant's most exciting accomplishments leading to this honor, is their widespread use of MEDITECH's on-line physician documentation, which came about as part of their Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) rollout.

Karen Sheehan, CIO at Swedish Covenant, attributes much of the organization's success with CPOE to the high level of physician involvement in the project. "We fully engaged the medical staff as well as hospital executives and the board during the various stages of the project," she states. "Also key for us was developing a strategic plan at the start of the initiative, as well as having the strong vendor relationship with MEDITECH."

Physicians Drive I.T. Initiative
Swedish Covenant leaders strongly believe that forming physician committees and involving department heads in the decision-making process was a major success factor with their extensive CPOE rollout. Based on a recommendation of the medical executive committee, the health care facility issued a hospital-wide mandate in July of 2008, so that caregivers across the continuum would have the chance to see the benefits for themselves. "As clinicians continue to see firsthand the benefits of our I.T. solution, we find it definitely fuels the adoption process," says Sheehan.

As a result, 100% of all inpatient orders at Swedish Covenant are currently entered via CPOE. Physicians and residents document on structured templates for all inpatient History and Physicals. In the Emergency Department, there is now 60% physician utilization of electronic documentation, and this month, they are expected to go to 100% utilization.

Seeing Tangible Results, Both Clinical and Financial
And the good news doesn't stop with physician buy-in: Swedish Covenant also happily reports significant improvements to the level of care clinicians are providing. "CPOE brings clinical data and results to our physicians much more quickly and easily than before we had MEDITECH's solution in place," says Sheehan.

Since the criteria for HIMSS Analytics recognition is quite rigorous, many hospitals have a difficult time getting past the closed loop medication process in Stage 5. Swedish Covenant overcame this challenge with the help of MEDITECH's Bedside Verification (BV) and electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR); now, care providers are safely and efficiently administering the Five Rights to each patient.

"Since go-LIVE, we have drastically improved patient care because we have been able to successfully minimize medication errors," says Sheehan. "If a proposed action is not safe, an alert appears in the system to warn the user and prevent patients from receiving any potentially harmful medications or treatments."

The advantages of having CPOE are also evident in Swedish Covenant's bottom line, a very exciting "bonus" which hospital leaders had not foreseen. "We are thrilled to see charge capture improvements in our ED, and the department has become more profitable overall for having gone through the strict Stage 6 requirements," says Sheehan.

Striving to Achieve all Patient Care Goals
Swedish Covenant is now in the process of ensuring that the few remaining paper-driven clinical areas of the hospital go electronic. They are also making plans to bring in MEDITECH's Scanning and Archiving and Medication Management solutions.

"We are currently doing medication reconciliation, but it's still a fairly manual process. We want to enhance our med rec and prescribing process by using the MEDITECH and DrFirst solution, which will provide us with a higher degree of accurate, timely data--including validated patient histories at our fingertips," says Sheehan.

"By adding these newer components to our already robust MEDITECH solution, Swedish Covenant continues to move forward as a leader in quality care delivery."