Christina Noel: Joining me today is Wendy Burns from Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock, CA. Emanuel is our first MAGIC site to utilize Data Express, a solution which allows hospitals to transmit electronic patient data to physicians' offices and clinics. Wendy is the Chief Information Officer at Emanuel and she's here today to tell us more about their implementation and their future plans for Data Express.

Choosing Data Express
Wendy Burns: There were two major deciding factors with choosing Data Express. One was that we already have a product with them, we have the Communication Director. And that's a very robust, reliable product for faxing. The other major decision was because of the endorsement with MEDITECH and the partnership with MEDITECH was very important, I think, with going with any external vendor.

Wendy Burns: I was the major decision point in deciding to go with Data Express, with the help of my Applications Manager, who is the one who would need to implement it and have her staff work on it. So she was a big part of the decision as well.

Designed for Speed
Wendy Burns: Yes, I felt it was extremely fast. Our original thought to get the data out to the physicians was either write an NPR report, or get it in HL7 format and put them out on an FTP server. And then I started thinking about all the maintenance and the updates between the MEDITECH system, and all the different EMR's and all their different versions, and I don't have the staff for that. So it was extremely fast. We were up very quickly and the data is real time. It's wonderful. Instead of going into the FTP server and having to grab the data, it's real time to the doctors.

Physicians and Clinics Receive Information with Ease
Wendy Burns: It's real time, they get the lab results and reports as soon as they're dictated. We do send reports only when they are in their final draft, but they get it real time. They don't have to go get it, they don't have to wait for a fax, they don't have to wait for it to be mailed.

Success in Implementation
Wendy Burns: In every way it was a success. We were able to send Lab, Micro, Blood Bank, Pathology, Radiology reports, and departmental reports to the beta EMR without any problems. Being a beta site we had to do a few little tweaking with MEDITECH, but it went very well and it was 100% successful and the physician group is extremely happy.

Future projects
Wendy Burns: We currently have two physician groups that we are going to send the data to very soon. One is our hospital based clinic and the other one is another group that has a different vendor from the site that we have LIVE right now. We're also looking at long range goals of possibly endorsing a physician EMR, bringing it into the hospital and using that as a way of recruiting other docs. If they go with this vendor, we have the physician EMR, and we're already sending the data there.