Holy Name is the first Medical Center in the nation to receive three JD Power and Associates Distinguished Medical Center Awards for Inpatient, Outpatient and Emergency Service Excellence

From an IT standpoint, Holy Name Medical Center is unique in that it has developed its own Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, named WebHIS. With its intuitive workflow, the system is extremely popular with not only its hospital based physicians, but with the attending and consulting physicians as well.

CHALLENGES: “All physicians hand wrote their progress notes which were attached to the chart real time. In an effort to improve quality we wanted to move the notes to the digital world and make them available electronically on the WebHIS. We could have scanned the notes which would have made them available online but many notes would still have been illegible” said Michael Skvarenina, Assistant Vice President, Information Systems.

SOLUTION: “We invited Datel Solutions LLC, a Dragon Medical Certified Partner, to demonstrate speech recognition to our Clinical, Executive and IT staff, and we recognized immediately that a Dragon Medical solution was precisely what we needed.” Skvarenina continued.

“Our key challenge, now, was to integrate Dragon Medical with our WebHIS EMR to make the speech input experience for doctors seamless. This is where we turned to Datel Solutions for their integration expertise”, said Skvarenina.

Currently, over 250 physicians use Dragon Medical to dictate their medical narrative directly into their progress notes, enhancing the patient note quality and documentation efficiency. EHR utilization has increased and in the next phase of the project, Holy Name is making Dragon Medical available to 100 additional physicians.

“The key to a successful Dragon Medical-EHR integration is in the resulting simplicity of use for physicians” said Rick Lobel of Datel Solutions. “When physicians log into their WebHIS accounts, their Dragon Medical user profiles are automatically loaded, so that physicians can begin dictating immediately”.

Datel provided Holy Name a complete implementation plan that included train-the-trainer knowledge transfer sessions for Holy Name’s Clinical IT staff. “Datel not only provided us with outstanding training and customized documentation, but also documented and taught us invaluable maintenance procedures, such as how to easily and automatically distribute new physician and drug names to all user profiles”, said Clinical Informatics Specialist, Deb Ross.

The solution ensures report creation/signoff is done in “real-time” – as soon after care as possible. Physicians at Holy Name are now happier and the quality of patient documentation has been enhanced. “The final output of quick, complete documentation is ideal,” said Lobel, “by the time physician leave the nursing unit, their electronic notes are completed.”

“The Dragon implementation at HNMC is now catching on like wildfire for physician progress notes,” said Skvarenina.