Memorial Health System heals patient services with PhysicianLink portal and content management solutions.

Overview

Challenge
Provide physicians and other care givers with the information they need, on demand, to treat the patient on the spot, regardless of where in the system the information originally resided

Solution
Portal, content management and electronic medical record (EMR) solution makes the most efficient use of stored patient information

Key Benefits
Improved patient satisfaction; reduced redundant paperwork, mailing costs, phone/fax time and personnel costs; increased documentation access for the physician’s office staff and the hospital; decreased time from diagnosis to treatment; provided ability to retrieve information in seconds, rather than hours required previously; easier compliance with regulations regarding release of information; reduced costs and errors through elimination of manual paper-handling processes; acceler­ation of return on investment for new EMR system

“We selected an IBM infrastructure based on IBM DB2 Content Manager because of our long experience as an IBM customer. IBM provides high-quality information systems that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
–Tom Kerwin, Vice President of Information Services and CIO, Memorial Health System

“Our PhysicianLink portal is an example of how our investment in IT gives us a competitive advantage. Fourteen hundred physicians in our community use the product. They love it. This really forms a support platform for all their systems and makes them want to work with us.”
–Dick Eitel, CEO, Memorial Health System

“IBM has delivered on its vision of open standards-based solutions, which has enabled us to serve our communities with prompt, authoritative information that can be easily accessed.”
–Tom Kerwin

Why IBM?
IBM had proven itself to be a high quality provider of highly available systems and IBM offered the breadth of products, due to the extent of its R&D activities, to solve the customer’s needs

Known for its excellence and innovation, the Memorial Health System (Memorial) in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is an example of a hospital system that has evolved from paper records and manual records handling to electronic information and records accessible through a convenient Web portal.

Memorial is growing fast along with the burgeoning half-million population of Colorado Springs. It needs to treat all of the citizens of its city, regardless of their ability to pay, which puts pressure on the hospital to maximize efficiency.

As it sought to provide better care and reduce patients’ costs, Memorial realized that it would need to switch to electronic health records to help it optimize the health, safety and comfort of patients, their families and the community. Such a solution would ensure that Memorial remains the preeminent healthcare provider in the community, leveraging technology and accelerating innovation to deliver predictable, stable and seamless patient care.

Vital link to 1,400 physicians
In its first step, Memorial used IBM components such as IBM DB2®, IBM WebSphere® Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal on IBM System p™ and System i™ servers to create and implement its PhysicianLink portal.

With PhysicianLink, physicians can quickly access patient lab and radiology results, patient demographics and insurance information, rounds, on-call lists, digitized radiology images, patient eligibility, transcribed reports, current national medical information, order procedures and much more from the Internet in a secure environment.

The success of PhysicianLink has helped Memorial establish itself as a leader within its healthcare community. “Our PhysicianLink portal is an example of how our investment in IT gives us a competitive advantage,” says Dick Eitel, CEO, Memorial Health System. “Fourteen hundred physicians in our community use the product. They love it. It gives them the information that they need, when they need it in a format that’s easy for them to access. This really forms a support platform for all their systems and makes them want to work with us.”

With the physician portal developed with WebSphere Portal, physician offices no longer have to make telephone calls to access patient information from Memorial. This frees up staff to focus on productive business, instead of waiting on the phone for patient results. Benefits for the physician offices include:

Reduction of redundant paperwork, mailing costs, phone/fax time and personnel costs while increasing documentation access for the physician’s office staff and the hospital.
Decrease in time from diagnosis to treatment by having results more accessible.
Provision of an accurate audit trail for communications and compliance.
Reduction of admission and registration time while increasing the accuracy of patient information.

Information availability with content management
To broaden its electronic document and content management capabilities and deliver more online information to doctors and other healthcare givers, Memorial implemented IBM DB2 Content Manager and IBM DB2 Content Manager OnDemand. Using Kofax Ascent Capture, employees captured millions of records going back six years including clinical notes, test results, diagnosis reports and other records.

“We selected an IBM infrastructure based on IBM DB2 Content Manager because of our long experience as an IBM customer,” says Tom Kerwin, vice president of information services and chief information officer for Memorial Health System. “IBM provides high-quality information systems that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

DB2 Content Manager serves more than a single purpose for Memorial. “In researching content management systems, we were looking for a system that was robust enough to take care of our business processing needs as well as our clinical needs,” says Kerwin. “So we chose DB2 Content Manager—for the financial and human resources operations of the organization as well as for the clinical operations.”

Instituting electronic medical records system
Most recently, the hospital has implemented a comprehensive electronic medical records (EMR) system based on Cerner PowerChart and supported by an IBM infrastructure. The hospital is now leveraging information for maximum efficiency throughout its organization, reaching more than 3,000 users, including remote physicians and healthcare providers such as nurses, clinical staff and ancillary departments.

The PowerChart solution streamlines multiple workflow processes into a single desktop application that provides access to various functions that support the EMR system. It’s also the foundation for numerous Cerner point-of-care solutions, including those for home care, physicians’ offices, clinics, acute patient care, critical care, and long-term and rehabilitation services.

Memorial engaged IBM Software Services to integrate the new PowerChart system with its existing DB2 Content Manager implementation so that electronic patient records such as scanned documents and printed documents in PDF format could be made available through the PowerChart interface. Now, when a user wants to view patient information—such as face sheets, lab results, doctors’ notes, progress notes, graphics, medications, discharge plans and consent forms—the PowerChart interface links with the DB2 Content Manager software’s eClient viewer, and the viewer conveniently opens in a separate window on the user’s desktop.

Leveraging a new weapon against illness
For this implementation, IBM Software Services combined the skills of the Information Management Software Services team with those of the Healthcare Software Solutions team. To integrate the DB2 Content Manager software with the Cerner PowerChart system, the combined IBM team used the Health Level 7 (HL7) standard, the predominant open standard in the healthcare industry for integrating information and applications.

By integrating the Cerner EMR solution with DB2 Content Manager software from IBM, Memorial improved the efficiency of its health records which in turn improved the delivery of care. Staff can now access pertinent patient information quickly and easily, whenever it’s needed. The solution enables the hospital to offer better quality of care, reduce risk and comply more easily with regulations regarding release of information. The solution also:

Reduces costs by eliminating manual paper-handling processes and mitigating the costs of potential litigation.
Helps to make the overall EMR system more complete.
Accelerates the hospital’s return on investment for the new EMR system.

“The main reason that we have partnered with IBM has to do with the robust infrastructure it can bring to the table,” says Kerwin. “IBM does more R&D than its competition, which allows it to deliver more products that meet our needs. Also, IBM has delivered on its vision of open standards-based solutions, which has enabled us to serve our communities with prompt, authoritative information of the highest quality that can be easily accessed.”

Key Components
Software
IBM DB2
IBM DB2 Content Manager
IBM DB2 Content Manager OnDemand
IBM WebSphere Application Server
IBM WebSphere Portal
Hardware
IBM System p p630, p650
IBM System i i570
Services
IBM Software Services

For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.

Visit our Web sites at:
ibm.com/healthcare
ibm.com/db2
ibm.com/software/genservers/portal

You can get even more out of Information Management software by participating in independently run Information Management User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at ibm.com/software/data/usergroup

For more information on Memorial Health System, visit:
www.memorialhealthsystem.com