Content area
Full text
BENCHMARK-BACKED DECISION-MAKING FUELS TECH SUCCESS
Sometime in January, more than 100 patients will pour into Saint Luke's Health System's new, state-of-the-art hospital in Lee's Summit, Mo., straining the abilities of doctors and nurses to keep up with the onslaught. Is the suburban Kansas City, Mo., hospital at ground zero in a possible outbreak of Avian flu or West Nile virus?
Not quite. In fact, the $110 million facility won't even officially open until later that month. Instead, the onslaught of patients-in reality, healthy people pretending to have all manner of life-threatening illnesses-will be the shakedown for one of the Most Wired hospitals in the country. "We're going to stress the system big time," says Gloria Sou's, chief nursing officer at the site.
From the start, quaint health care holdovers from the past like X-ray film and paper medical records won't be found at Saint Luke's East-Lee's Summit, as the hospital is officially known. Instead, patient information will reside in digital files that physicians and nurses exchange over a buildingwide wireless network. Because much of the technology infrastructure is so new, the hospital wants to find chinks in the high-tech armor before actual cases start hitting the ED, ICU and surgical rooms.
For Saint Luke's, the new digital hospital will be the culmination of a multiyear effort marked by liberal mixing and matching of leading-edge technologies to boost clinical quality and solidify finances.
"We've got an opportunity to use a brand new campus as a test bed," says John Wade, vice president and CIO. "We can bring in these newer technologies, work out the wrinkles and then retrofit the [digital practices] to our other locations over the next 18 months."
Technology alone offers no guarantees when it comes to improving clinical quality or business accountability in highly competitive health care markets. Hospitals need to track the impact of their IT initiatives to keep them on course and to inform future projects. Saint Luke's has taken this lesson to heart. As it expands its ambitious efforts to become a digital hospital, it is also implementing sophisticated benchmarking tools that track outcomes in detail. As a result, the organization's leaders are able to know on a daily basis how it's performing for patients, clinicians, the business...