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Sweeny hospital upgrades systems
Published January 28, 2008
SWEENY — Keeping up with electronic advances can be a struggle for small hospitals, but Sweeny Community Hospital recently received new equipment to bring it closer to that goal.
The hospital has installed a new electronic medical record system to keep track of patients as they go through the hospital, Administrator William Barnes said.
“It’s very important to know that 16 percent of urban hospitals have an EMR and only 4 percent of rural hospitals do, so we’re in the top 4 percent right now”, he said.
All areas of the hospital, from the labs to physicians and nurses, eventually will be able to log their interactions with patients and eliminate the need for stacks of paper, he said.
“You can bring up all the results on the screen at one time,” Barnes said. “It’s the same thing as a medical record that’s on paper, but it’s on computer and we can track all orders, physicians can sign off, nurses can sign off on medications they’ve given and orders that are received.”
The program they are using was developed by Prognosis Health Information Systems of Houston, and the system is in the process of receiving certification by the U.S. Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, Barnes said.
The commission requires an electronic medical record system be implemented in two hospitals before it can receive full certification, Barnes said.
“We were approached by Prognosis Health Information Systems as a certification site,” Barnes said. “The certification agency will contact us later on and ask questions about what problems we did have and how they were addressed. Once the company gets full certification, they can market their product and we’ll be a demonstration site for the hospitals.”
Since the hospital is a trial site, its only cost to implement the program was in training employees how to use it, he said.
Sherri Pierce, director of nurses at the hospital, said she is excited about using the program.
“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from the staff and the physicians about the ease of its use,” Pierce said. “We’re working with the company to get things set up to our specifics … kind of tailoring it to what we specialize in here.”
The program also has a backup system, should there be a power outage or a glitch in the server, Barnes said.
“A lot of places are going with electronic medical records and it’s just a good idea and it’s a good quality measure,” Pierce said.
The system should enhance safety as well, she said.
“For the most part, the physician doesn’t call the lab and give an order,” Pierce said. “What they’ll do is write it down — and everyone knows how physicians write — so there’s always interpretation of that order.”
The program also will flag when a doctor has ordered an unusual dosage of a medication and if patients are allergic to medications, Pierce said.
The hospital also acquired some upgraded equipment for cardiac care and for testing for different disorders, Barnes said, in addition to adding a new ambulance to the Sweeny EMS Department.
Erin McKeon covers West of the Brazos communities for The Facts. Contact her at (979) 237-0152.
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