Clinical & Nursing Documentation Solutions Help Nch Optimize & Standardize Clinical Care

In 2007, Northwest Community Healthcare (NCH) launched an ambitious initiative to

roll out IT solutions for clinical and nursing documentation, surgical documentation and utilization, and medication administration. The end result would be a major redesign of our clinical processes.

This project demanded a deep understanding of our own current processes and practices so they could be articulated in a single documentation and order system.

Hampered by a lack of experience in designing a standards system that would fit NCH's needs and processes, we decided to seek expertise from McKesson to guide us in a series of rapid design sessions that studied and re-engineered our clinical workflow.

With a design structure in place that drew on the expertise of physicians, nurses and caregivers from throughout the organization, we were able to build a customized clinical documentation system that supported clinical practice rather than simply driving it.

Through these sessions, we standardized our processes and practices. There are often variations in how care is rendered within organizations, and these differences can increase costs and reduce quality of care particularly when there is a lack of evidence to support specific clinical practices.

With the guidance of McKesson's clinical process experts, we focused on these variations and arrived at standards that served the needs of the NCH community.

The fruit of all this work was realized with the go-live of the IT solutions and a system that has produced significant improvements for our staff. For example, the project:

1. Eliminated 63% of nursing documentation processing steps

2. Eliminated 87% of paper-based process steps

3. Reduced process flows from 12 to 3

Our next step brought medication administration and documentation together at the bedside. Once again, we examined current processes and developed improvements through a partnership between McKesson and our clinical and IT teams. By the time we deployed bar-code scanning of medications, we had also redesigned the medication process to increase efficiency in the care delivery process. Process steps were reduced by 37%, while manual charting fell by 52%.

Implementing technology can be a complicated and demanding experience, but, as we discovered, it is also a unique opportunity to fundamentally redesign and improve the delivery of healthcare. That's good for everybody.

For a complete version of this article, visit McKesson online.

by: Dale E. Beatty

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