Improving Patient Care Through Data Availability in the ICU

For the physicians and nurses at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, a member of the 20-hospital University of Pittsburgh Medical Center health system, the logic behind going totally paperless as the clinicians and staff prepared to move into the hospital’s new replacement facility in 2009 was inescapable. Already live for several years with its EMR and CPOE, the hospital’s move to its brand-new facility was to be accompanied by the elimination of nearly all of its remaining paper-based processes.

And because the hospital's IT staff, led by vice president and CIO Jacqueline Dailey and CMIO James Levin, M.D., Ph.D., had long been collaborating closely with clinician leaders, the organization was well-positioned to reap all the benefits of automation in preparation for the move, which took place in June of 2009.

There was just one big wrinkle, insofar as clinicians in the hospital’s three intensive care units (its general ICU, cardiac ICU, and neonatal ICU) were concerned. While the organization’s core EMR/CPOE system (based on the Cerner Millennium suite, from the Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner Corporation) supported a host of innovations to patient care delivery, intensivists working in the ICUs found themselves struggling with one automation element. Read more at Healthcare Informatics.