Baptist Healthcare System Exceeds Meaningful Use Thresholds in the ED on Day of Go-Live

Baptist Healthcare System, Inc., based in Louisville and one of Kentucky’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organizations that includes five acute-care hospitals, is one of several T-System clients that are harnessing the emergency department (ED) to meet Meaningful Use requirements. All three Baptist sites that have already gone live with T SystemEV exceeded Meaningful Use thresholds in the ED on the first day. They did so with a standard implementation and training and without interruptions to workflow or the need to implement disruptive alerts.

Baptist’s leaders realize that the ED is the front door to the hospital and an important starting point for an electronic health record (EHR) so that complete patient care documentation can be captured. Because the final Meaningful Use rules allow the ED patient population to be included in a hospital’s threshold measures, harnessing the ED can be an easy way to demonstrate Meaningful Use. The fact that there will be no shortage of ED patients only makes this strategy stronger: The American College of Emergency Physicians announced on Oct. 18 that ED visits rose 13 million last year—the largest increase ever. In 2010, Baptist had 188,300 ED visits, and 42 percent of its 85,000 inpatients were admitted from the ED.

Baptist’s enterprise strategy orchestrated for Meaningful Use includes the use of an enterprise-wide EHR, computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, and T SystemEV. Because T SystemEV features CPOE, which can be implemented quickly, at a low cost and which receives 100 percent adoption, Baptist decided to count all ED patients admitted to its inpatient and observation units to show Meaningful Use.

T SystemEV will help Baptist with many other Meaningful Use requirements in the ED, e.g., discharge instructions, patient education, transitions of care, patient copies of medical records, medication reconciliation and quality reporting. When patients are discharged, the EDIS can reconcile their medications with their discharge prescriptions. Moreover, to meet the threshold for transitions of care (which do not include admissions from the ED), Baptist will post a clinical summary generated via the EDIS to a physician portal. Baptist will also send the summary to a private health information exchange to share with referring doctors and eventually its employed physician group’s EHR.

Baptist chose T SystemEV because the design is ED-workflow centric. Leadership believed emergency physicians and nurses would readily accept T SystemEV, and the investment has proven true.

“T-System’s specialized ED functionality has moved us forward in creating an integrated healthcare delivery system to not only meet – but exceed – Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements and compliance goals in our ED,” said Jackie Lucas, Baptist Healthcare System vice president and chief information officer. “We’re even more thrilled that we were able to meet these goals in the ED on the first day of implementation.”