Information Technology at UPMC
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is nationally recognized as a leader in applying information technology to improve the care and safety of patients, customer service and business processes. Regularly named as one of the "100 Most Wired" health systems in the United States by Hospitals & Health Networks, UPMC has partnered with leading vendors, such as IBM and Alcatel-Lucent, to develop technology solutions that will benefit health care providers and patients worldwide. Here are some highlights about the use of information technology at UPMC:
- UPMC has invested more than $1 billion in information technology over the last five years to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of patient care.
- Our IT staff includes about 1,200 technology specialists and dozens of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who are directly engaged in IT work.
- UPMC supports 200 clinical applications from more than 120 vendors.
- Our IT system includes more than 44,000 computing devices and over 980 Terabytes of data.
- eRecord has more than 29,000 active users, including more than 5,000 physicians employed by or affiliated with UPMC, and comprises more than 3.6 million unique, electronic patient records.
- More than 261 UPMC physician practices use eRecord to improve the quality and safety of patient care.
- Computerized physician order entry (CPOE), which improves the accuracy of medication administration, is deployed at four of our 20 hospitals, averaging 2.3 million orders monthly.
- More than 20,000 people have registered to access a Web-based patient portal called HealthTrak, where they can view test results and key aspects of their medical record and communicate with their physicians.
- Five UPMC hospitals use a positive patient identification (PPID) system to administer medications. This bar-coding system, which matches patients to their medications, has decreased the rate of medication errors at UPMC Presbyterian by 55 percent.