Digital patient records
HEALTH: $53M project over 10 years at PRHC
Calling it “a great day for patient care,” the chairman of the Peterborough Regional Health Centre board of directors announced Thursday a 10-year plan to spend $53 million on information technology that will centralize data and allow hospital staff and clinicians to spend more time at patients’ bedsides.
The investment “crosses all programs and services at PRHC,” Gary Lounsbury told staff assembled in the hospital’s cafeteria for the announcement.
“We are making the single largest investment in our people and operations since the new hospital was built” five years ago, he said.
“This information technology and information management investment will help bring the physicians, nurses and healthcare professionals back to the bedside,” Lounsbury said.
“It will put the tools of the 21st century in their hands to ensure they have access to comprehensive, electronic patient records where the care is being provided. It will also provide our healthcare team with instant access to the latest information on best practices in the care of our patients.”
The new system will give medical professionals “the tools to work smarter, not harder, and to help us attract the best and brightest to our facility,” he said.
PRHC lags far behind other hospitals in its IT investment, said president and CEO Ken Tremblay.
“We are in a competitive environment,” he said, “and we compare ourselves to hospitals of similar size that are basically years ahead of us on this journey. While we were building this new hospital, they were spending money on IT, and now it’s time to catch up.”
As measured by the Health Information Management Society, the level of hospitals’ IT sophistication is measured in seven stages, with the seventh representing a paperless electronic patient records system, said Nancy Martin-Ronson, PRHC’s chief nursing executive and information officer, who studied the hospital’s existing system.
“We are currently at Stage 2,” she said. “When I watched physicians and other clinicians, they’d have to reach into their pockets for spare scraps of paper. They didn’t have a comprehensive view of patients. So it really wasn’t working. You would have to look for the green binder to find out about patients’ medications and another source for other information. There were about five different places you would have to look to find any overall view of the patient, and only one of them was a computer.”
Martin-Ronson said the hospital is aiming to be at Stage 6 by 2019.
“Our lack of technology has been seen as a huge barrier,” she said. “So by 2019 we will deliver an improved patient experience and improved patient safety and quality.”
Lounsbury said now is the right time for the investment.
“This is something we know we have slipped behind in over the years,” he said, “because our attention has been on getting our fiscal house in order, but now we have things settled down. We have balanced budgets, so now we can go ahead and start to invest in the future.”
PRHC was unable to invest in IT when the new hospital was built, Lounsbury said, “because we were under pressure from the (Ministry of Health) to hold the line on many things. We did invest in a lot of new clinical equipment, but we didn’t have the money for an overall ITbased patient records system. We couldn’t afford it.”