Hospital switches to digital records

LYNWOOD - St. Francis Medical Center announced this week that it has launched its new electronic health record, the digital patient chart that replaces paper records.Digital records makes sharing a patient's medical information with other health professionals - including doctors, nurses and laboratory and imaging technicians - faster and easier, hospital officials said. The electronic system keeps a patient's medical information secure, while allowing healthcare providers easier access to data such as medical histories, medications and test results. The digital record system took more than two years to create and was built specifically for St. Francis Medical Center using QuadraMed healthcare software. A team of healthcare informatics specialists along with St. Francis Medical Center physicians, nurses, pharmacists and technicians from laboratory and imaging contributed to the program's development. As the initial move to electronic charting is completed, the next phase will be computerized physician order entry, which enables doctors to electronically enter instructions for the care of their patients, officials said. That is expected to roll out in the next several months. The hospital is already implementing medical device integration using iSirona technology. Already in place in the hospital's ICU, the technology allows digital records to directly accept readings from bedside and mobile devices, such as patient monitors, allowing doctors to spend less time writing and documenting.

********** Published: August 09, 2012 - Volume 11 - Issue 17