Kara Marx, CIO of the 460 bed Methodist Hospital serving the San Gabriel valley in California, recently took time out of her busy schedule to talk with HealthTechnica about her organization’s new MedPlus implementations.
Methodist Hospital recently engaged two of MedPlus’ products. MedPlus Centergy and MedPlus ChartMaxx were both installed throughout their facility. MedPlus Centergy is a suite that integrates data aggregation and exchange technologies of HIT solutions and MedPlus’ own data exchange, document capture, and physician office technologies. ChartMaxx is an enterprise-wide electronic health record solution built on a document management and imaging system. Simply put the two systems form an EHR on top of an ECM system (Enterprise Content Management) with an advanced health information exchange back end.
Kara told us about the many reasons Methodist Hospital was looking to move forward with these types of solutions, and why they specifically chose MedPlus.
We were focusing on ‘the next generation of care’ (a key strategic vision of Methodist). This was a foundational tactical project toward our strategic mission of becoming a ‘paperless hospital’ in the next 5 years.
Kara explained that her organization had several objectives to meet with this project:
- improve experience of patient care
- increase efficiency of the organization
- improve compliance – verbal orders, data time stamps, etc…
- implement a patient portal
- support long term mission for CPOE
- Standardized Order Sets
- position for Meaningful Use dollars
With their goals and strategic mission in hand, Kara’s teams started vetting vendors and looking for solutions. They came upon MedPlus. MedPlus offered an integrated and tightly coupled solution for all of the issues Methodist wanted to solve. Additionally, MedPlus had won the prestigious “Best in KLAS” award. MedPlus became the vendor of choice.
Kara acknowledged that Methodist had previously had very positive experiences with their other core software vendor, Quantum, but her organization really wanted to obtain a product that was a ‘one stop shop’. Quantum couldn’t meet that need. Methodist Hospital moved forward with the Centergy and ChartMaxx solutions with high hopes.
Did MedPlus live up to expectations?
The simple answer Kara gave was “Yes”.
Length of stay associated with patients was decreased, we realized gains in efficiency and revenue, the product has significanlty supported an improvement in the patient experience, and decision making is enhanced. We have a nearly paperless Patient Financial Services department (post discharge) and now have interfaces to transcription for discharge
It is easy to see Kara is pleased. It sounds like the physician and nurse base are also very pleased.
Communication is greatly improved, Physicians have remote access to clinical records, they can plan their day, and have an opportunity to perform clinical decision making with longitudinal data.
It seems that Kara Marx, Methodist Hospital, and the patients they serve have a hit on their hands with the products of MedPlus.
