St. Clair Hospital Selected as HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award Winner

The Mt. Lebanon, Pa.-based St. Clair Hospital has been named a 2014 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award recipient by the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Since 1994, the HIMSS Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence has recognized outstanding achievement of organizations that have utilized health IT to substantially improve patient outcomes while achieving return on investment. The Davies Awards program promotes EHR-enabled improvement in patient outcomes through sharing of case studies and lessons learned across a wide range of efforts, including implementation strategies, workflow design, best practice development and adherence, and patient engagement.

Davies Enterprise Award recipients are Stage 7 and 6 hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations, a designation from the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) developed in 2005 by HIMSS Analytics. The EMRAM is an eight-step methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record systems for hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database.

St. Clair Hospital, an independent, 328-bed acute care facility that provides healthcare to more than 500,000 residents of southwestern Pennsylvania, has realized a broad range of significant benefits through the use of information technology, while serving a patient population that includes a large ratio of Medicare patients, according to a HIMSS press release.

An example of health IT implementation success at St. Clair Hospital comes with the introduction of improved patient flow for patient registration in the ED. This new workflow protocol included an ED status board and associated analytics, computer provider order entry (CPOE), electronic documentation and an electronic bed management system. In the first year after the introduction of these changes,

• waiting room times decreased from 49 to 4 minutes;
• time to see a physician decreased from 76 to 28 minutes; and
• patient satisfaction scores increased from the 14th to the 99th percentile with these two changes in the ED.

“St. Clair has significantly reduced hospital acquired infections and medication errors through the innovative use of IT,” Jonathan French, director of quality and patient safety, HIMSS North America, said in a statement. “As a hospital that serves a large Medicare population, improved clinical outcomes have resulted in revenue capture and costs savings critical for the organization’s financial health.”

St. Clair Hospital will present its story and receive the Davies Award at HIMSS15, April 12-16 in Chicago.