With or without healthcare reform, hospitals can still find ways to increase quality and hold down costs, according to Michigan health system which is used healthcare IT to establish evidence-based care.
At the 2009 Annual Conference of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Sept. 13-16 in Washington, D.C., Paul Conlon, senior vice president of clinical quality and patient safety at Novi, Mich.-based Trinity Health Systems, said healthcare IT has allowed the system to transform care.
Trinity is the fourth largest Catholic health system in the country, with 44,500 full-time equivalent employees and 8,074 active staff physicians. According to Conlon, Trinity began a project in 2003 to install electronic health record systems in all of its 45 hospitals nationwide, with plans to invest $400 million over 10 years in the project.
Though only 23 of the system's hospitals are up and running with healthcare IT, the return on investment is already beginning to show, Conlon said. This year Trinity Health Systems had a positive margin, despite the recession and a 23 percent unemployment rate in some of its markets, he said.
The project requires "going live" with IT overnight in each facility targeted for the change, but preparation takes up to two years. Trinity now has 7 million patients with electronic medical records, the third largest repository in the nation, Conlon said. Three thousand charts are opened each day across the facilities, with more than 1,200 caregivers able to view the records simultaneously.
According to Conlon, Severity-adjusted mortality rates are at 70 percent, and 100 percent of the system's core measure performance is greater than the national average. Nurses have 8 percent more time at the bedside, he said, and the system has helped Trinity avoid an estimated 14,000 potential adverse drug events per year.
Despite the improvements, Conlin said, "it takes people to change care, not just IT." He said the adjustment to evidence-based practices took "a relentless pursuit of improvement," front line involvement and coordination between different groups within the hospitals.