St. Elizabeth Healthcare (Edgewood, Ky.) is launching a large-scale EMR project that will connect hospitals, clinics and physicians offices in Northern Kentucky. The six-hospital system will use Epic’s (Verona, Wis.) software and will be powered by IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) servers running AIX, IBM’s UNIX operating system.
The EMR will be rolled to physician offices in September, followed by clinics and ambulatory care sites within St. Elizabeth Healthcare. St. Elizabeth, which includes nearly 1,000 physicians, 31 primary care physician offices and four imaging centers and clinics, is expected to be fully connected in one unified system by fall 2010.
The roll-out is expected to help improve the quality of care each patient receives by providing better access to patient information, a complete view of patient history, medication and treatment plans, and even faster access to lab results to make better, more informed decisions, says IBM.
