(HENDERSON, November 20, 2012) — St. Rose Dominican Hospitals has successfully deployed a fully-integrated electronic health record (EHR) system. This new system, accessed through the hospital's computer network, includes medical records of patients served at any St. Rose location. With the EHR system in place, St. Rose Dominican Hospitals’ nursing and clinical staff can share electronic access to patient medical records, medications and doctor’s notes from previous visits, allowing doctors and nurses to instantly retrieve patient healthcare information.
“We have received a great deal of positive feedback from our medical staff members using the EHR software over this past month,” said Rod Davis, president and CEO of St. Rose Dominican Hospitals and senior vice president of operations, Dignity Health Nevada. “The new system enhances communication between our teams to ensure we are delivering the highest standard of medical care safely and efficiently to our patients.”
Benefits to patients include decreased medication errors, increased legibility via electronic orders, prevention of redundancies in charting and a reduced length of stay for patients with fewer repeated tests and treatments.
“We are very pleased with how the new system can provide a doctor or a nurse an all-encompassing, holistic view of the clinical data they are seeing in a patient’s electronic record,” said Dr. Allen Marino, chief medical officer and executive sponsor of the project for St. Rose Dominican Hospitals. “It’s obvious that our staff understands the EHR system and its positive effects on patient care. Now that the EHR foundation has been laid, the hospitals will be adding new modules such as Mother/Baby and ePrescribe in the future.”
There are approximately $45 billion in incentives earmarked to reward the adoption of EHR technology for hospitals that meet stringent Meaningful Use Stage One government requirements. These funds (a combination of Medicare and Medicaid) are accounted back to the individual hospitals to defray the costs of EHR implementation. St. Rose’s goal is to be counted as one of those deserving hospitals.
St. Rose Dominican Hospitals and Dignity Health have worked with Cerner Corporation, a top-rated information technology organization that has been servicing the health care industry for more than 30 years, to implement the technology and establish a fully-integrated EHR system.
