2 page Case Study - Posted 9/19/2008
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Hospital Improves Patient Care Using Online Collaboration Portal
Introduction
Saint Raphael’s is committed to collaboration with its providers to deliver high-quality care and differentiate itself in a competitive market. Recognizing that most medical errors are the results of ineffective communication, St. Raphael’s used IMPACT Management to help implement a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution that provided a dynamic portal for sharing information, reduced costs and improved medical decision making.
Business Needs
Saint Raphael’s sought to further its market differentiation by implementing solutions to make it easier for its providers to work with the hospital and provide the highest level of care possible to its patients. The hospital has a significant investment in its current electronic health information system, including secure Web-based remote access, and needed to build upon this infrastructure. Furthermore, the solutions needed to avoid redundant IT workloads and expenses, and internal organizational competencies needed to be established to help maintain and expand the solution. Finally, the solutions needed to be more dynamic and flexible to address gaps in the hospital’s current Internet and Intranet strategies as well as engage a predominantly voluntary, non-hospital-employed, community-based medical staff that has many area options for hospital care.
More specifically, the hospital needed secure mechanisms to proactively distribute patient-specific clinical information to the healthcare providers involved in care as a way of improving the effectiveness and timeliness of medical decision making. The initial solution targeted the management and distribution of diagnostic radiology reports and emergency department visit notes for improvement because the growth of hospital-based outpatient services is critical to financial success, and delays in review of such clinical information can have significant adverse effects on patient care. One challenge involved was the practical reality that busy providers often forget what they have ordered and, since most of the outpatient visits are scheduled at the patient’s convenience, it is difficult for the provider or the provider’s staff to know when the results will be available for retrieval and review. Therefore, the goal was to offer a secure, Web-based single point of contact that would proactively prompt providers to access patient files to review new information and provide access to the files directly, resulting in a more dynamic, efficient and collaborative environment.
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Microsoft’s SharePoint has proved to be a user-friendly, scalable and versatile solution that has lived up to its promises. |
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John H. Drury, M.D., FACC, FACP, Chief Medical Information Officer, Saint Raphael Healthcare System |
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Solution
Dr. John Drury, a cardiologist serving multiple roles at Saint Raphael, including chief medical information officer and medical director of care management, was exceptionally positioned to champion solutions to improve provider communication and patient safety. His solution leveraged existing hospital investment in Microsoft technologies to develop a collaboration portal to achieve the following goals:
Enhanced Communications
Improved Decision Making
Effective Teamwork
The portal is an extension of a previous Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 project, in which clinical reports were distributed to physician group sites. That project demonstrated the value the SharePoint platform could deliver for complex clinical report distribution, workflow automation and cross-functional communication. The new solution uses additional functionalities of SharePoint and builds upon a physician-focused strategy. This allows more accurate information delivery and creates a more customer-focused experience.
Working with Dr. Drury’s vision and specifications, IMPACT Management built a portal of standardized physician-specific sites that receive clinical reports and notes from the existing hospital information systems, announcements and department-specific resources. This information is now available throughout the hospital using the same workstations that support computerized order entry, making information readily available where providers are making decisions.
Previous workflows that included mailing clinical reports to multiple providers are now automated. Group e-mails have become portal-based announcements. Department members have access to necessary resources, and employees can provide feedback. IMPACT refreshed a legacy project, updated hospital specifications and built the portal on top of a new database system supporting more than 2000 providers across the hospital system of care. Furthermore, interfaces were established between the portal and other enterprise systems including Microsoft Office, registration, billing and document-printing applications. This allowed the SharePoint portal to supplement the existing intranet by providing the infrastructure for employee discussions and blogs, dynamic worksites for multidisciplinary teams and collection of form-based quality improvement data.
Benefits
“Providing safe and high-quality care is a fundamental goal of all healthcare organizations,” emphasizes Dr. Drury. “To achieve this goal we recognized that the majority of medical errors are due to the lack of effective communication between healthcare providers, especially during the 'hand-off' of information during transitions of care. Leveraging information management technologies like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server has been very successful and is central to our safety and quality improvement strategies.”
The collaboration portal solution filled gaps in the hospital’s Internet and Intranet functionality by providing better dynamic integration with other organizational information systems. It enabled the hospital to develop a secure, user-friendly, Web-based environment targeting its voluntary medical staff and made it easier and faster for healthcare providers to access clinical records from various departments and different data warehouses. The integration resulted in a more flexible data management strategy that both pushes information to appropriate providers and enables more timely and efficient pulling of information by providers to empower their medical decision making.
The new system also saved the hospital money by building upon existing IT infrastructure and expertise; limiting proliferation of stand-alone applications; and eliminating redundant clerical work, since several important workflows are now automated. Furthermore, the system mitigates regulatory compliance risks by allowing for the systematic distribution of mandated state and federal care process announcements.
“Microsoft’s SharePoint has proved to be a user-friendly, scalable and versatile solution that has lived up to its promises,” said Dr. John Drury. "It also provides us a robust platform upon which to quickly implement other solutions. Key among these is the Patient Safety Portal developed by IMPACT Management, which will be critical in helping us meet JCAHO patient safety goals by accelerating our implementation of a standardized approach to day-to-day patient 'hand-off' communications.”
