Penn Highlands Elk faced a challenge familiar to many hospitals: how to bring together information so clinicians could make fast, effective decisions about patient care. In response, the organization chose iatricSystems Visual SmartBoard™ to pull data from multiple systems and provide color-coded, real-time views of relevant information, customized for different workflows. Penn Highlands Elk has deployed more than 700 SmartBoards to meet an immense variety of needs throughout the hospital. “Not having to run reports…being able to see all that data on one screen…creating alerts based on selected criteria—that’s power,” says Derrick Goode, Clinical Informatics, Penn Highlands Elk.
Streamlining Workflows and Improving Care Visual SmartBoard provides Penn Highlands Elk with a flexible platform for creating, modifying, and repurposing SmartBoards wherever they can make a difference in patient care. Over time, Derrick has been able to do much of the work himself, calling on iatricSystems as needed for technical expertise and knowledge of what works at other hospitals. With this collaboration, Penn Highlands Elk has deployed SmartBoards to streamline and improve workflows in virtually every hospital department.
Here are just a few examples:
Nursing: SmartBoards assist with clinical decision-making and patient monitoring. The ability to document directly into the EHR from within a SmartBoard improves efficiency because information is visible immediately to all staff.
Lab: SmartBoards improve patient care by monitoring lab results and patient medications, and alerting staff to STAT orders. By seeing peaks and troughs, and interactions between medications, pharmacists can adjust medications appropriately.
Pharmacy: Many SmartBoards are used to support the hospital’s paperless pharmacy initiative. They help pharmacy staff track and manage orders, including orders awaiting lab results and/or physician clarification.
Respiratory Therapy: SmartBoards show patients on respiratory medication, next med due, attending physician, and similar information. They also are used for managing STAT orders, with automatic alerts to RT staff.
Quality/Sepsis: Quality managers use SmartBoards to track Congestive Heart Failure, Acute Myocardial Infarction, and Surgical Care Improvement Project to diagnose patients and alert the care team when a critical protocol is necessary. To help meet the new CMS Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) requirement for sepsis, a SmartBoard monitors patients that are possible, probable, or positive, allowing physicians to intervene and prevent a sepsis crisis.
Long Term Care: Pinecrest Manor, Elk’s long-term care facility, uses SmartBoards to improve their Minimum Data Set (MDS) quality scores. Other SmartBoards monitor various items including wounds, fall risk, and immunizations/vaccinations.
Discharge/30-day Readmission: A SmartBoard monitors discharged patients and detects readmission within the CMS 30-day window. Any readmission for a similar condition triggers an automated alert to the Director of Nursing and Case Management for follow-up and to determine what, if anything, needs to be done differently.
A Flexible Platform, a Great Resource
With technical help from iatricSystems, Penn Highlands Elk continues to roll out new SmartBoards, which are improving patient care and productivity. “We had great hopes for Visual SmartBoard, and it has definitely paid off,” says Mary Ann Schwabenbauer, CIO, Penn Highlands Elk. “iatricSystems has been a great, great resource for us.”