Mountain View Hospital has announced its intention to move forward with Cascade Community Healthcare on the next major phase in its transition to fully electronic records for patients throughout the region. The project involves all four of the region’s hospitals: St. Charles in Bend and Redmond and CHC’s two managed facilities, Mountain View Hospital (MVH) in Madras and Pioneer Memorial Hospital (PMH) in Prineville.
“Mountain View Hospital is very excited to work with St. Charles Bend and Redmond, and Pioneer Memorial Hospital on this important regional project.Our caregivers strive to provide the finest patient care beginning with the very first interaction with the patient.This new technology will allow us to manage comprehensive medical information in ways that will improve healthcare quality,” noted Jay Henry, Mountain View Hospital’s Chief Executive Officer.
The new initiative, called HealthSync, is unprecedented in scope, and will set the bar for similar technology and healthcare initiatives on a national level.Hospitals across the region are currently using multiple systems (paper and technology), and caregivers, physicians and most importantly, patients, will benefit from the move to an interconnected system which will contain all necessary health information in one place.
HealthSync incorporates financial, materials management and numerous other systems in addition to the clinical information systems. HealthSync will automate processes involving patient registration, billing, human resources, general accounting, lab, pharmacy, radiology, nurse/physician orders and documentation and surgical services.
“We’re very pleased to be moving into the next stage with our technology,” explained Marilynn Black, Senior Vice President of Information Services for CHC. “Patients throughout the region will benefit from this because their caregivers and physicians will have instant access to critical, personal health information when they need it most. Let’s say a patient from Madras is injured in Prineville — caregivers at PMH would be able to instantly access that patient’s record so they could make the best possible healthcare decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information.”
A multi-disciplinary team of 100 caregivers and physicians from around the region participated in a rigorous process for choosing a vendor to provide the technological backbone for the new HealthSync system. The team selected McKesson Corporation, a top-ranked Fortune 500 company and the nation’s largest healthcare services group.
The new HealthSync system should be implemented for financial and business systems at CHC, MVDH, and PMH by first quarter 2008. Clinical systems will be implemented by the end of 2008. Representatives from different departments within each hospital throughout the region will be involved in building, testing and implementing a system that is tailored to their needs.
The primary goal of HealthSync is to improve patient safety and care throughout the region. HealthSync is also expected to reduce physician and caregiver hassle factors associated with using multiple systems, streamline financial and materials management, provide information for effective performance reporting, produce infrastructure for efficient and secure sharing of information, and provide a healthcare technology platform to support regional change in the future.
