Information technology magazine InformationWeek has named Christiana Care Health System to its 2011 InformationWeek 500, calling the health system an innovative technology user and featuring one Christiana Care IT initiative in the annual issue's "20 Innovative IT Ideas To Steal" article.
The article highlights Christiana Care IT leadership in the innovation and implementation of a two-part, break-through emergency department communications and workflow system. In the first part, the department streamlined call routing and logging by replacing the paper portion of both functions with a state-of-the-art internally invented software application that greatly improved communication between clerks, clinicians and physicians.
In the second part of the solution, Christiana Care, the only Level 1 trauma center between Philadelphia and Baltimore, added touch-screen monitors inside and outside one of its trauma rooms that display details of trauma cases and an interactive diagram of personnel positions dictated by the health system's trauma policies. Trauma responders use the screens to assess the situation and then "log in" to the appropriate roles by scanning their badges before entering. The interactive maps are then updated with each responder's name and photograph, enabling those in the trauma room to more easily identify colleagues partially hidden behind scrubs and surgical masks.
"We are always hunting for and excited to drive solutions that help our colleagues provide an even greater level of care for patients," said Randall Gaboriault, Christiana Care's Chief Information Officer. "These break-through enhancements to the emergency department's communications process were an ideal mix of critical processes that could dramatically benefit by applying the right technologies to the right processes, with a naturally intuitive user experience to enable emergency personnel to get right to work and eliminate cumbersome manual processes and focus even more on their patients. To make this possible we would have searched and searched the market for a solution that doesn't exist, so we invented it."
InformationWeek's coverage of Christiana Care and the rest of this year's "Ideas To Steal" are available at www.informationweek.com.
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