UPMC Team Honored for Efforts to Improve Patient Care with Comprehensive Electronic Medical Records
PITTSBURGH, June 29 – Based on its efforts to provide comprehensive and seamless electronic medical records—whether a patient is seen in the hospital or a physician’s office—the interoperability team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has been selected as a recipient of the 2009 Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) awards.
The UPMC team, led by Chief Medical Information Officer G. Daniel Martich, M.D., is one of eight winners recognized for successfully applying information systems to the practice of medicine to improve patient care and efficiency. The recipients will be honored at AMDIS’ 18th annual Physician Computer Connection Symposium, July 14 to 17, in Ojai, Calif.
Specifically, UPMC, one of the leading nonprofit health systems in the country, has completed the first phase of an extensive interoperability initiative, which went live in February 2008. Working with partners dbMotion and Initiate Systems Inc., UPMC now provides access to integrated medical records from more than 30 clinical systems to over 20,000 UPMC caregivers.
The dbMotion™ Solution and its platform for health interoperability and intelligence enables UPMC to present clinicians with a single, comprehensive view of critical patient data, including allergies, medications, lab results, problems and physician notes, without replacing existing information systems. The Initiate® Interoperable Health solution includes its enterprise master person index (EMPI), which ensures that data pulled from disparate systems in both inpatient and outpatient settings is matched to the correct person.
Dr. Martich and his team also have completed the first stage of providing “semantic interoperability” to clinicians, which allows data to be transferred and organized in meaningful ways. For instance, if a patient’s records show allergies to penicillin under a variety of drug names, all of these penicillin allergies are appropriately grouped together. “The mapping done by our team makes this simplified view possible,” said Dr. Martich. “Future development efforts will tackle even more complex representation and analysis of data in our efforts to provide the right information to clinicians at the right time to ensure the best possible care for patients.”
UPMC, which has an investment interest in dbMotion, has already demonstrated quality and productivity benefits from its interoperability initiative. A study done at one of its 20 hospitals showed an 82 percent reduction in the time spent collecting pre-operative patient information, while improving patient readiness for surgery by 50 percent. “Most importantly, we have seen countless examples in which access to a complete patient history from across UPMC has improved the care of patients and potentially saved lives,” said Dr. Martich.
UPMC has long been recognized as one of the health care industry’s leaders in adopting technology to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care. It has been named for 10 consecutive years as one of the 100 Most Wired hospitals and health systems in the United States by Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, the journal of the American Hospital Association. Two of UPMC’s hospitals are among the nation’s most advanced users of comprehensive electronic medical records, according to HIMSS Analytics, a wholly owned, not-for-profit subsidiary of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
AMDIS is a non-profit organization representing more than 1,800 physician leaders responsible for information technology in their organizations. The awards recognize that physicians are taking a much greater role in acquiring, installing and supervising the use of information and computer technology.
About UPMC
UPMC is an $8 billion integrated global health enterprise headquartered in Pittsburgh and one of the leading nonprofit health systems in the United States. As western Pennsylvania’s largest employer, with 50,000 employees, UPMC is transforming the economy of the region into one based on medicine, research and technology. By integrating 20 hospitals, 400 doctors’ offices and outpatient sites, long-term care facilities and a major health insurance services division, and in collaboration with its academic partner, the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, UPMC has advanced the quality and efficiency of health care and developed internationally renowned programs in transplantation, cancer, neurosurgery, psychiatry, orthopaedics and sports medicine, among others. UPMC is commercializing its medical and technological expertise by nurturing new companies, developing strategic business relationships with some of the world’s leading multinational corporations and expanding into international markets, including Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Cyprus and Qatar. For more information about UPMC, visit our website at www.upmc.com.