A Healthy Dose of IT

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Rose Harr repeats a mantra when approaching technology projects: "It's an evolution, not a revolution," she says. And who would know better than the CEO of BlueWare, a Cadillac, Mich.-based solution provider that caters to small and midsize health-care facilities--a vertical known for its resistance to change, even when it's for the better.

So when the West Branch Regional Medical Center, an 88-bed community hospital facility located in rural Northern Michigan, turned to BlueWare to upgrade its IT infrastructure more than a year ago, Harr knew that to work with physicians--not to mention nurses, billing departments, boards and all the complex departments that make up the facility--she had to think like them. Suffice to say, changing the way doctors work with the information they use to treat patients is no small feat.

"The most important thing to physicians is their time," Harr says. "They work in 10- to 15-minute segments. That's how long they're booked for appointments, how they make rounds on the hospital floor--they think in those segments of time."

As part of the project, the hospital also needed BlueWare to help it join the electronic-medical records (EMR) evolution.

"We had to automate--we had no choice," says Randy Lewis, information systems director at West Branch Regional Medical Center. "With HIPAA regulations, we're all moving in that direction. To stay in business, automation is a must."

The Implementation

On its road to HIPAA compliance, Lewis first chose a health-care information system from Keane about three years ago. Once that system was successfully in place, Lewis went back out to the market for an EMR solution and checked out BlueWare, which was also conveniently a Keane partner.

BlueWare's EMR offering, the Wellness Connection suite, is designed around the ease of use health-care organizations crave, with patient information accessible in two clicks and the screen designed around how physicians like to view patient information. Even training for the product is geared toward the physician set, with a 10-minute training and certification class.

"If they know how to use the Internet, they know how to use the system," Harr says.

Lewis says he and his team were impressed with what they saw.

"We demoed the BlueWare product with physicians, the hospital board and other users and found it was a perfect fit," Lewis says. "We decided we wanted the BlueWare package to take us to the final step that we needed."

The BlueWare implementation began more than a year-and-a-half ago, with milestones set along the way that served as checkpoints.

"We had a team working on-site with [West Branch] on the installation, as well as with department heads to work through training, deployment and interoperability," Harr says.

Weekly project management meetings were also held to keep the project on track.

Lewis says the emergency room was the first department to go live on BlueWare, followed by the outpatient department, which has been live now for several months. The BlueWare applications--which are based on IBM DB2 Content Manager software and run on IBM's eServer i810--are also available in physicians' offices and via remote access for doctors to dial in, view patient medical records from home and order treatments before they even get to the hospital.

"This is a rural community, and some physicians can take an hour or so to get here. They're not right around the corner," Lewis says. "It's a huge benefit to be able to start patient care immediately."