Transcript

Hunterdon Healthcare is the leading provider of medical services in Flemington, New Jersey, located about an hour outside of New York City.  In conjunction with Hunterdon Healthcare Partners, an integrated delivery network with 204 healthcare providers in the community, Hunterdon Healthcare was an early adopter of electronic health record technology and continues to implement this technology across its network of physicians. 

Currently, there are 14 medical practices using the network’s electronic health record technology.  These include eleven family practices and three specialists.  In the next 15 months, eight more family practices and seven specialty practices will go live on the electronic health record platform. 

Utilizing state-of-the-art portal technology that facilitates the exchange of patient information utilizing the electronic health record, all Hunterdon Healthcare partner physicians will be able to share critical healthcare data about their patients and with the health system as a whole, including the flagship hospital at the heart of the community, the 178-bed Hunterdon Medical Center.

Well, we were very excited at Hunterdon to implement electronic medical records for a variety of reasons.  I think it has the potential to really transform healthcare across the country.

Hunterdon Healthcare Partners is the organization that had the responsibility for selecting, and then the implementation of the EHR in the physicians’ practices out in the community.  And that includes both employed physicians of the Hunterdon Healthcare system, as well as independent physicians in the community.

Implementation of an electronic health record has required a team effort between the physicians of Hunterdon Healthcare Partners and the .  There were financial, technical, and coordination challenges as with any widely developed technology.  However, Hunterdon Healthcare quickly addressed and overcame these challenges.

There are a lot of challenges in the healthcare of patients.  I’m a family practitioner, so I have to coordinate the care of my patients between specialists and among the various community groups that take care of my patients as well – physical therapy, nutrition – as well as coordinating the care in and out of the hospital.  And so access to information that’s legible and timely can make a huge difference in the care I’m able to provide. 

Traditionally, most of the communication between nurses and physicians has been done on paper, with something attached to a paper chart, which meant someone had to go find that chart first, which is a problem in itself.  Now, all the chart information is contained on the computer, and there’s an electronic message that’s attached to that chart that would allow the physician or the nurse or whoever to do the – whatever the task is without having to actually look at a paper chart.  That’s huge, because in an office – depending on whether you’re one provider to twenty providers – there’s always an issue of finding charts because they’re on someone’s desk.

These electronic messages are – we’re able to track, we’re able to monitor with reports, so that none of these items actually fall through the cracks.  They’re, theoretically, all getting done and in a timely fashion. 

We also, through the use of electronic prescriptions, are able to go and send a prescription electronically for the patient without having to, again, get out a piece of paper, fax something to the pharmacy.  It’s all done electronically.  It’s all done within several minutes of when the actual request is completed.  So, it has greatly improved the communications that the nurses and the physicians have seen.

The beginning of the process for us was to first get all the sites, which was 28 sites, up on the practice management portion of the software.  That meant taking practices, who were on all different softwares prior to that, training their staff, and implementing a change from their old software to the new software.  We have a total of approximately 500 users that will be ultimately accessing our system.  That’s made up of 150 providers and the rest of the staff of clinical and non-clinical in their offices.

In order to make sure that we’re ready for the EHR, the practice management piece had to be up first.  That’s where the demographics sit with the patients that are accessing the practices.  And it took us a year to get those 28 sites up and running on the practice management side of the software.

We had to make some early-on decisions.  As we’re going with one database, we had to decide were we going to manage the server farm in-house, where all of the practices would be tied to, or was there a better solution outside?  In our case, we actually ended up going with a company called Tellurian, because it worked better for us to have our data farm off-site with an organization that was going to be managing it for us 24/7.  We didn’t have the capabilities of doing that in-house. 

So, once we had that up and running, we were able to start the training and the moving of the practices onto the practice management software.

Cost for implementing such a system-wide health record technology solution does not have to be overwhelming.  There are options for finding cost solutions that address both the technology and infrastructure.

The implementation of a medical record is often challenging for practices, as well as healthcare systems.  But more than challenging, it’s rewarding.  It’s a long process that takes tight coordination between the IT, administrators, and providers. And that is the critical part of making a successful implementation of an electronic medical record is bringing in all the parties, getting them to the table, and deciding on a go-forward strategy.  You’ve gotta make it scalable; it’s gotta be sustainable.  And we were asked to come in as the IT organizations, where Tellurian Networks, a Perot Systems company, to address that IT component and help out with the implementation of electronic medical records.

The agreement by the medical staff that the electronic health record was better than the ballpoint pen, that they played a critical role in advancing, in their offices, on the floors, a model of healthcare that moves to the next level information sharing.  Of course, another issue was a matter of cost.  The issue of shared expenses was a way to overcome it.

The successes for Hunterdon Healthcare have been impressive.

Electronic health records, we all know, is the right thing to do.  Based upon the recent HR1 enacted just last week, it’s now the imperative of healthcare systems across the country.  The sooner that hospitals and their partner physicians begin to talk about its importance – and then overcome the mistrust that may exist, one party to another – and explore what applications will be available to them, the sooner, I think, they’ll become partners in focusing in on what we’re all about here:  the patient.