Patient safety helps hospitals prioritize purchases

With an eye on the economy, local hospitals are proceeding with previous plans to upgrade technology and purchase needed equipment cautiously, representatives say.

“We are being more selective in the prioritizing equipment purchases and allocation of resources,” according to Craig Luzinski, chief nursing officer for Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins. “When we look at requests, one thing that makes it pop as a priority is patient safety – that takes it to the top.”

That’s also true at McKee Medical Center in Loveland, says chief financial officer Lori Sehrt. “As we prioritize the requests, the number one criterion is patient safety issue.”

SPONSORED CONTENT

Business Cares: May 2024

As Mental Health Awareness Month unfolds in Colorado, it serves as a reminder of the collective responsibility to prioritize mental well-being.

Paul Matthews, McKee’s public relations director, added, “Where the economy hits is that we try to defer those things that don’t have to be done right now.”

“Capital constraints are worth thinking about in this first quarter of the year as we wade through our situation at a national level,” explained Kurt Gensert, vice president of nursing at Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton. “We’re making big strides in terms of electronic health records. That’s on everybody’s horizon.”

All three organizations are moving ahead to install and/or complete technology upgrades.

Platte Valley has already made great strides, Gensert said. “We have a strategic plan in place and we are on track to the month right now. We are completely electronic in-house with nursing documentation and roughly halfway through medication bar coding and in-patient pharmacy project. We’re planning on kicking off our Electronic Data Repository this year whereby most of our paper-based documents are scanned in and become queriable electronically. That’s a huge hurdle.”

He says the final piece, the Computerized Provider Order Entry will be  in place by the end of 2011. “That really makes up the substance of the complete electronic health record – very little left at that point. There are few hospitals that operate without paper but most of us aspire to get as close to paperless as possible.”

McKee is adding CPOE in July, Sehrt said. “We want to be paper-light and do as much electronically as possible.”

e-records enhance safety

PVH shares that aspiration, Luzinski said. “We’re getting ready to migrate to a new systems platform called Client Server. We’re calling this project e2, which stands for Enhancing Excellence through technology and process. This will let us look at the financial outcomes related to what we are doing now.

“We started using electronic records five years ago but it was previously used by finance and administration, ” he continued. “Now our nurses and physicians are the dominant users. For 2009, we’re identifying the processes we want to work on. The software delivery is scheduled for 2010 and, in 2011, everyone in the organization changes over in one day.”

The management team is also assessing CPOE, according to Luzinski. “With CPOE, rather than writing orders, physicians select protocols in the computer. We’re already doing that in the emergency room. That will help us use more of an evidence-based approach and if we can standardize processes, we will be more efficient and produce better patient outcomes.”

At McKee, which is owned by Phoenix-based Banner Health, “We’re moving ahead with CPOE,´ said Anne Rydesky, associate administrator. “It really came out of the patient safety world.”

“It’s a national initiative based on the idea that the less human steps there are and the fewer number of people entering information onto a chart, the less likely to have human error,” Matthews added.

McKee made a significant investment last year to start the process and, Matthews said, “This is the next big step in our implementation of electronic medical records.”

New systems, equipment

McKee will also be installing a monitoring system called iCare in its Intensive Care Unit in the second half of this year. iCare is a system that keeps tabs on a patient around the clock from a facility in Arizona via telemedicine cameras and other highly sensitive monitoring technology that can pick up changes in a patient’s condition. Real-time communication between doctors and support staff help determine appropriate actions for individual patients. “It provides an additional layer of support in addition to the high level of care already in place in ICU,” Matthews said.

All three hospitals are also adding new equipment. Platte Valley just added a 64-slice CT scanner, which Gensert says carries a large acquisition cost but “can give the image of a beating heart. We can evaluate coronary heart disease in a less invasive fashion than before and we can glean a lot of information on patients quickly and safely.”

PVH is in the process of putting in a 64-slice scanner that will be operational around the end of March, according to Luzinski. McKee will add its 64-slice scanner in either the third or fourth quarter of this year, Matthews says.

The scanners are capable of performing 64 slices per rotation at less than 0.4-0.7 mm resolution, which provides a view of extremely high accuracy and detail.

And, for PVH, the replacement of beds is continuing. “They have new technology in these beds that will prevent patient falls,” Luzinski explained. “We can set parameters in the bed so an alarm will alert staff. Late last year, we put these beds in half the system and spent $1 million. We’ll spend another $1 million this year and put in the other half.”

Any investment that will address potentially dangerous situations for patients is a good investment for a hospital, he added. “With limited resources, we need to look at how we can use technology to address these situations, always keeping the safety of the patients in mind.”