A Healthy Dose of IT

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."

The Next Step

The hospital has now turned its attention to another mammoth task: scanning 10 years' worth of old patient charts--which are currently being stored in a large building next door to the hospital--onto optical disks and getting them online. A job like that can cost anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000, says Lewis, who asked BlueWare's Harr whom she had worked with and would recommend to do the scanning.

"We asked because as many clients as BlueWare has installed, there had to be other clients that had asked the same question and done the same thing," Lewis says.

In fact, Lewis depends on solution providers, such as BlueWare, for such technology advice and recommendations. With a total IT department of three, it's very important that he works with a true partner, he says. What else is Lewis looking for?

"Someone that will work with you, that will step up when you're having a problem and work with you to get through it, help you find solutions," Lewis says.

It's a two-way street, he adds.

"I'll help you and you help me, and we both win." Lewis is also always looking for a provider that is upgrading more often than not because he doesn't want his products to get stagnant.

"It's a lot of work when new releases come out, but it's good because that means we're keeping up with changes in the industry," he says.

Lewis' ultimate vision? He has plans to extend the BlueWare application to every hospital area a medical record touches so that paper charts will no longer be used.

"Everyone will use the EMR exclusively and every paper chart will be scanned in, shredded and destroyed," Lewis says.

The Big Picture

The combined Keane/BlueWare project, from start to fully electronic, ran West Branch Regional Medical Center about $2 million, with hardware for both platforms totaling approximately $250,000, estimates Randy Lewis, information systems director at the hospital.

Keane is providing the health-care information system applications, such as a physician order-entry system, acting as the sort of "front-end system for patient care," Lewis says. West Branch utilizes BlueWare as the electronic format for patient charts, offering integrated applications to manage and digitally store patient information that a nurse or physician would need to see on a single screen.

"We cut our paper budget by 30 to 40 percent," Lewis says. "We've also seen significant cost savings of $50,000 in the first six months, and we're 100 percent HIPAA-compliant."

As part of West Branch's use of the BlueWare solution, Lewis also has worked under the requirement that anyone accessing a certain record must give a reason for doing so. "I go into BlueWare, and first off I have to say why I'm going in," he says. "That is audited and stored for review by our corporate compliance officer."