Smooth Go-Live For Electronic Health Record at Erie Humboldt Park

Smooth sailing and cool heads characterized the go-live for Erie Humboldt Park's electronic health record system.

Erie successfully launched it’s Alliance-hosted Electronic Health Record (EHR) system at Erie Humboldt Park on Thursday April 24, 2008. This is Erie's second large site to go live. Erie West Town turned on its electronic health record in August 2006.

The Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services, LLC was formed by 4 community health centers (Erie Family Health Center, Heartland Heatlth Outreach, Howard Brown Health Center and Near North Health Services) to improve the delivery of quality health care to underserved patient populations. The mission is to share resources and to integrate services thereby enhancing quality and economies of scale.

The centerpiece of the Alliance's mission to improve health care quality is to provide a centralized hosting model for a robust electronic health record system. The system has been customized to meet the needs of underserved patient populations with disproportinate shares of diseases such as HIV, diabetes, heart disease, asthma late entry into prenatal care and obesity.

Alliance partners use General Electric's Centricity EMR.

Erie Humboldt Park is a large site with 21 exam rooms. Approximately 35,000 patient visits are conducted there annually.

There is no easy flick of a switch to launch an EHR even if you have done it at another site within your own organization before. EMR products are not ready to go out of the box such as a software product you might puchace for your home computer. The essentials include a well organized internal implementation team with a sponsor who is an executive within the organization and an information technology team that knows what it is doing. The Alliance provided the professionals who can design the implementation, train the endusers and host the service.

Superior technical support, training and overall design and help support was provided by the Alliance throughout the process.

With the addition of Erie Humboldt Park to the electronic health record system, Erie’s 2 largest sites will provide over 80,000 patient visits annually in the electronic environment.

The Alliance-hosted EHR is on target to cover over 100,000 individual patients through over 350,000 anual patient visits in Chicago alone with its EHR. Aliance has expanded its services to host the EHR at heath centers from San Francisco, to North Carolina.

I'll post some photos soon.

Adelante!

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UIC School of Public Health Features Erie Family Health Center (and me)

My alma mater for public health is the School of Public Health at the Unversity of Illinois Chicago. A recent on line article features Erie Family Health Center and says nice things about me.

A quote from the article:

“Here in our own backyard, 1.3 million Chicago-area residents are uninsured, and one out of three of the city’s uninsured is Hispanic,” Francis said. “At Erie, we know from experience that ‘one out of three’ isn’t just a statistic. It’s a life that’s being compromised by a lack of access to medical care.”

Chicago Top Docs Named But What's Missing?

The January 2008 Chicago magazine (yet to hit the web and news stands) names Chicago's top doctors.  It is a great honor to be on the list. Those selected have been nominated by peers and vetted by a fairly rigorous selection process designed by Castle Connolly Medical LTD. 

First, a disclaimer, and a congratulations.  My wife, Dr. Michelle Gittler, has been named for the 3rd time as a Top Doc in her field of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital. And she truly is one. I'm very proud of her.  Imagine coming home to that every night! And hopefully,  I get to be the spouse guest again this year  at a swank downtown reception in honor of this year's Top Docs.

But something is missing from the Chicago and Castle Connolly Report.  The major safety net hospital serving patients without regard to the ability to pay is conspicuously left off the magazine's index to hospitals. 

That's right, John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County is apparently not a hospital in the minds of Chicago magazine or Castle Connolly.  

Ignore its  244,112  emergency department and urgent care visits in 2006* (University of Chicago 80,000 -- Northwestern 73,500 -- Cook County safety net Provident 53,974 -- University of Illinois 52,000 --  Mt. Sinai 50,250, -- Rush 46,000 -- Advocate Illinois Masonic 38,122).  

Also ignore their good health outcomes -- the fact that the Cook County Bureau of Health Services is one of the largest cancer care providers in in Illinois with 5-year survival of Stage II breast, colon and lung cancers all significantly better than US averages.  Operative mortality for cardiac surgery is better than national  benchmarks despite serving a population more likely to be high risk to begin with.  

Another example is neonatology survival.  Despite caring for smaller premature infants, the Stroger neonatal ICU has a greater survival rate than the national average.

Additionally, the County-run CORE center cares for 31% of all known HIV patients in Chicago and 20% of all known HIV patients in Illinois.

We can't ignore what County is famous for:  trauma care.  Of 6 trauma centers in the Chicago region, the Stroger Trauma Unit sees 40% of all trauma cases.  If the patient comes in alive, there is a 95.5% chance that the trauma team will save their life.

When you include the entire ambulatory health care network of Cook County, almost 500,000 patient visits were accomplished in 2006.

Given the sheer size of the health care operation and the exemplary health outcomes odds are there should at least one "Top Doc"  at Stroger Hospital or within the Cook County system named by Chicago magazine and  Castle Connolly.

Yet, conspicuously, none of Chicago's "Top Docs" are at Stroger Hospital, or for that matter, in the entire Cook County Bureau of Health system. 

Perhaps the "Top Doc" selection methodology is skewed towards physicians who serve patients who have insurance and access to academic and private medical centers leaving safety net docs largely unrecognized.

I hope that next year's Chicago magazine report recognizes top docs for all.

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*Stroger Hospital 2006 -- 124,880 visits in the main Emergency dept., 12,678 in the Pediatrics ED and 103,553 visits in the walk in urgent care Ambulatory Screening Clinic.