Editorial Hails Parkview "Ahead of the EHR Curve"
Posted: 3/17/10
"Parkview's Ahead of the EHR Curve"
A Brunswick Times Record Editorial
March 17, 2010
A little more than a year ago, President Obama called for a national Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. He’s also made electronic record-keeping a key feature of his health-care reform effort, citing evidence that electronic records reduce errors and waste and enhance quality of care for patients.
Cost and the difficulty of switching over from paper medical records to electronic records are the usual reasons given for why it hasn’t happened already ... as well as why it might take awhile to get there.
Parkview Adventist Medical Center in Brunswick, on the other hand, is already doing what Obama’s initiative seeks to accomplish at every one of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals by 2015.
It’s an accomplishment that Parkview has every right to be proud of — as does the hospital’s chief information officer, Bill McQuaid, who has been receiving national accolades for his successful efforts in converting the hospital to a completely electronic medical recordkeeping system.
In just six years, McQuaid and his team have moved Parkview from the multiple-vendor paper-based information system that’s found at the typical hospital to a single-vendor electronic-based system that puts the hospital in an elite group of just 2 percent of U.S. hospitals that have computerized the recording of physician notes, ordering of medical tests and prescriptions and reporting of test results.
In doing so, Parkview’s physicians, nurses and other health-care staff are able to access and share information smoothly and quickly, helping them make better health-care decisions because everyone is accessing the same “information loop.” That, in turn, reduces errors and improves patient safety.
How important is that to the overall effort to reform our national health-care system?
According to an Oct 13, 2008 article in the Chicago Tribune, $700 billion out of $2.1 trillion in health-care spending is wasted due to unnecessary tests, X-rays and procedures reordered by doctors who weren’t aware of all the information in patients’ paper-based medical records. Think of it — one-third!
Likewise, medication errors can cause unintended complications or even death. Parkview’s electronic bar-coding system for prescriptions — which creates a unique bar code linking the right prescription to the right patient — is a big reason the hospital was the safest in Maine for patient safety four years in a row, with its 2009 ranking being 97 out of 100 points.
Aside from these important benefits to patients, what McQuaid and his team at Parkview have accomplished is a testament to what a “can-do” attitude coupled with out-of-the-box thinking can accomplish without spending tons of money.
That, no doubt, is why hospital representatives from 10 states and four countries have visited Parkview to see firsthand how a small hospital has already achieved the electronic health records goal President Obama wants all hospitals to reach by 2015.
“One of the key reasons for Bill’s success,” says Parkview President Ted Lewis, “is that he never thinks anything is impossible. He thinks, ‘What’s the problem?’ and then gets a team together to solve the problem. There’s always a way to solve the problem — that’s the way he thinks.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if our gridlocked Congress could do as much with respect to health-care reform and other important issues?