ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Eclipsys Corporation® (NASDAQ:ECLP), The Outcomes Company®, announced today that Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center (Bronx Lebanon), the largest voluntary, not-for-profit healthcare system in south and central Bronx, NY, has quickly expanded its use of integrated clinical components of Eclipsys Sunrise Enterprise™ suite of solutions. In addition to a seamless “big bang” activation of Sunrise Emergency Care™ within its emergency department (ED), Bronx Lebanon has recently completed a successful, six-month accelerated activation of Eclipsys’ Sunrise Ambulatory Care™ solution within a 40-doctor multispecialty practice. The ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) implementation is the first step in a plan to roll out ambulatory EHRs to all 27 of Bronx Lebanon’s outpatient practice clinics in 2010. Both activations build upon the healthcare system’s use of Eclipsys’ access management and industry-leading computerized physician order entry (CPOE) solutions within its acute care environments.
“Because Eclipsys’ CPOE solution is integrated with Sunrise Ambulatory Care, we were able to utilize applications, such as orders, immunization manager and wellness manager, which are embedded in the structured notes of our ambulatory EHR,” said Eliot Heller, M.D., chief medical informatics officer, Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center. “Amazingly, we completed the launch with only two IT staff dedicated to the project because of the expertise and planning assistance we received from our Eclipsys team. I believe we deployed the outpatient EHR faster than any of the other healthcare systems in our area.”
Added Heller, “This launch also has given us a scalable template for deploying an EHR solution in our remaining 27 ambulatory care practices.”
Bronx Lebanon utilized Eclipsys’ speed to value methodology to deploy Sunrise Ambulatory Care. The ambulatory EHR solution provides outpatient physicians with clinical decision support, web-based practice management and medical billing support and embedded connectivity to streamline healthcare data exchange with pharmacies and payers. This functionality not only increases operational efficiency, but also will help providers demonstrate meaningful use, a key requirement for hospitals that seek to qualify for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus funds. Sunrise Ambulatory Care v 5.0 is Surescripts certified for Prescription Benefit and Prescription History services and Prescription Routing with retail pharmacy.
Bronx Lebanon further leveraged its Eclipsys’ technology platform with its recent “big bang” activation of electronic physician documentation of patient care in the emergency room setting. Steven Anderman, chief operating officer, stated, “Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, the combination of careful resource planning, physician leadership and execution, as well as strong Eclipsys support resulted in a very successful EHR implementation, with no loss of operational productivity and minimal problems in our busy ED.”
The activation, which involved 60 physicians, builds upon ED nurses’ use of Sunrise Emergency Care, as well as Eclipsys’ electronic tracking board. Now that both physicians and nurses are utilizing the same system, the hospital has significantly eliminated documentation redundancy among the care team for improved speed and accuracy of care notes and orders.
“The Eclipsys support people were instrumental in the ED activation going so smoothly,” said Thomas Boyd, M.D., assistant medical director, ER, Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center. “They demonstrated strong knowledge of the applications and took the time to familiarize themselves with the specifics of what we wanted to achieve at Bronx Lebanon. From a benefits perspective, the Eclipsys solutions have provided our emergency physicians with a visible measure of increased charting accuracy and workflow efficiency. Laboratory and radiology results and past medical history are all automatically pulled into the chart. We’re no longer rewriting radiology interpretation, so rather than slowing work down as was feared, the new technology is providing us with data that is a great benefit to performing admission diagnosis and assessments.”
The ED activation was another large implementation for Bronx Lebanon to bring it to an almost 100 percent electronic world. In 2010, it will complete rolling out the EHR solution to most of the remaining 27 Bronx Lebanon practices, followed by a dedicated rollout of Eclipsys’ clinical documentation solution within inpatient settings at its two main hospitals. Once the IT projects are completed, the health system will have enabled bi-directional, enterprise-wide information sharing and access to patient records from any location.
