Case Study: Physician Buy-In Drives EHR Success For Kentucky Hospital

This case study highlights how Rockcastle Regional Hospital And Respiratory Care Center made a successful switch from paper records to EHRs by ensuring physicians were acclimated and trained on the EHR and CPOE platform prior to implementation. With patient information now at their fingertips, physicians are finding the EHR helps them make timelier and more accurate treatment decisions.

When administrators at Rockcastle Regional Hospital and Respiratory Care Center in Mt. Vernon, Ky., embarked on the transition to a paperless information system, they were determined to bring everyone on board, even physicians. Cindy Burton, chief nursing officer, knew that getting physicians acclimated to an electronic system and trained to enter patients' orders themselves would be challenging. With a supportive staff, strategic training and support from HMS, the team at Rockcastle was able to achieve that goal.

"HMS was responsive to our needs as an organization and stayed positive for us," Burton says. "Whatever it was that we were trying to accomplish, HMS was looking for ways to help us be successful."

Since choosing HMS for an electronic health record (EHR), along with Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and a host of other clinical and financial applications, the not-for-profit community health system has received statewide recognition for its commitment to improving patient care and safety. Rockcastle, which operates an eight-bed emergency facility, a 26-bed acute care facility and a 93-bed long-term respiratory care center, was among 1.5 percent of hospitals in the country, as of late 2009, with a comprehensive electronic record system, as defined by the March 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Everyone in the organization is using the technology," Burton says. "From registration and scheduling to the doctors' offices, we took the attitude that we were going to do this." Since Rockcastle went live with the HMS system, Burton says she has noticed significant changes. For example, transcription errors are down. "It's hard to measure the ability to communicate, but we know communication is much better now as far as being able to access information on a patient," Burton says.

From the beginning, the project had strong support from the hospital board, administrators and clinicians, who saw the need to wean the organization off of its reliance on paper for patient care. Locating charts used to be a hassle for nurses, who were constantly trying to dig up records on patients who made frequent visits to the hospital at all hours of the night.

"Patients might come into the emergency department who had been there a week before, and we couldn't lay our hands on that piece of paper with the record of their past visit," she says. "It might be 2 a.m., and we would have to send someone to medical records, which was closed, to dig through files looking for the patients file."

Because Rockcastle was already using an electronic platform in its lab and business office, the hospital looked for a vendor that could offer an integrated system throughout all its facilities. Representatives from the financial and clinical departments, as well as physicians, saw demos from several vendors and liked the way the HMS system looked and how user-friendly it was. Access This Content To Read This Case Study In Its Entirety.