Rush-Copley Medical Center has tossed out its three-ring binder medical charts in favor of new computers that will track patients’ records at their bedside.
The Aurora hospital installed the $1.5 million computerized clinical documentation system last week in the intensive-care unit. Officials say it will eliminate paperwork and give physicians easy access to charts and lab test results.
The rest of the facility will be computerized by April, hospital officials said.
“Before we had an actual three-ring binder that was the patient’s chart. At the end of their stay, the binder would go to medical records in another part of the hospital and stay forever,” said Nancy Wilson, director of critical care at Rush-Copley. “Now we do all of our nursing care right there in the room and document everything right there at the bedside. . . . This allows the nurses to spend much more time with their patients in the room.”
Each patient bed will have a computer workstation hooked up to a network system, created by Florida-based Eclipsys, that will let physicians track and call up information about a patient’s medical history and health assessments.
“The real focus is to improve the access time for the caregivers and improve quality of care. If you reduce that turnaround time from the time a lab order is placed until the results are available to read, that improves the quality of care,” said Dave Hicks, director of information services for Rush-Copley.
Once the system is completed, physicians and other health-care providers will be able to access pull up medical records from anywhere in the hospital, Hicks said.
“A common problem in most hospitals is the patient may be in one place and the chart is in another part of the facility,” Hicks said.
With this technology, the hospital will join 90 other medical centers nationwide that have computerized patient records, Hicks said.
“There are a lot of hospitals and organizations across the country that are talking about that, but there are very few that have actually done it,” Hicks said.
The multiyear project at Rush-Copley also will include electronic order entry that allows personnel to read medical charts and place orders for lab tests, medication or physical therapy on-line, Hicks said.
Physicians now write out all medical orders, Hicks said.
“The paper-based chart has been around hundreds of years,” Hicks said. “People are very comfortable with that, but we are changing all that.”
