Massena hospital builds e-database
MASSENA — Imagine getting sick while vacationing in Florida — sitting in the waiting room of a strange hospital, filling out endless stacks of forms, trying to remember the names and doses of all your medications.
Then imagine checking into that same unfamiliar hospital and giving a doctor you have only just met a compact disc, or your permission to access a secure database containing your complete electronic medical record, including health history, allergies, medications, blood test results, X-rays and contact information for your doctors back home.
Electronic medical records have been touted by state and federal officials, including President Barack Obama, as a way to centralize patient information, make hospitals and health-care facilities more efficient and improve patient safety.
Massena Memorial Hospital Chief Information Officer Jana M. Grose states their value much more simply: "It's just better health care."
For the past several years, MMH has been undergoing the transition from keeping paper records of every test, scan and visit a patient makes to putting that information in a secure online database, which will eventually be accessible to each of the facility's associated physicians.
In recent months, the MMH Board of Managers has agreed to invest in an upgrade to the system, which will enable local physicians to have laboratory or radiology reports and images sent electronically to their offices for each of their patients and integrate electronic records kept at the hospital with those kept at physician offices.
"Instead of getting paper forms, which are collected and delivered by a courier who carries the records over to each office around town, the records will go from our system to the patient's electronic medical record, which can be accessed at the physician's office," Ms. Grose said. "Where before, you had the potential for results to get lost in the shuffle or delayed, this will happen much faster and will be a part of that complete electronic medical record."
A picture archiving system will also allow participating physicians to pull up high-quality images of X-rays or MRI scans to review while a patient is in their office or as soon as the results are certified and available. Work is also being done to allow physicians to access the database from their home computers, which would be helpful in the event one of their patients was hospitalized in the middle of the night.
The goal is to eventually have complete patient medical records available electronically for use by MMH and any physicians or specialists a given patient visits here in his or her lifetime, officials noted.
MMH is hoping to add other upgrades that will allow physicians to electronically submit prescriptions to local pharmacies from the hospital, a practice which some already use in their offices.
"There is a push for people to be more interactive with their health record," Ms. Grose said. "Right now, patients can come in and ask for a disk to be made of their existing electronic medical record. As we add more to our system, more information will be available in that electronic record."
While the new technology opens up a number of new possibilities for patients and health-care providers, MMH officials note the push to go paperless is not without its drawbacks.
The technology is still expensive, especially for a small municipal hospital like Massena, and the challenge of having a number of potentially incompatible software systems in use across the country could make progress in automating patient records slow and the vision of each person having a portable electronic record more difficult to achieve.
Right now, physicians must purchase the necessary software and hardware to equip their offices for keeping and using electronic records. This can be expensive, especially since a high level of security is needed to preserve patient security and confidentiality, officials said.
Getting rid of paper records will help MMH cut down on the amount of space needed to store patient files and the chances that single sheets of paper containing test results or other important information may be lost. But laws still require that some information be stored for a number of years, and MMH officials say the need to keep paper copies of some records as a backup will likely mean cabinets of manila folders will be sticking around for a while.
"You have to keep building and building up the system to do more," Ms. Grose said. "Right now, our doctors are asking us when they can start doing this or that electronically. It's going to take some time; it's really baby steps and it can be hard to get used to, but the physicians who are using it now would never let you take it away."
"Ultimately, it's about better continuity of care and better patient care," she said.
