Quality Patient Care Through
Information Technology

Imagine that your doctor wants you to have your blood drawn at a hospital as part of your regular check up. You register for the blood test online and when you arrive at the hospital at 6:00 a.m., you check in by inserting a Care Card in a kiosk and have a seat. You’re finished with the registration in minutes. Shortly after, a clinician comes to greet you and accompanies you to the lab for your test. At 6:15 a.m., the clinician draws your blood and by 8:15 a.m., just two hours later, your doctor on staff at the hospital, telephones you with the results. Sound unbelievable, like some futuristic story? Well, believe it. It’s not off in the future. It’s totally in the present. That’s how things work at Heritage Valley Health System. The electronic registration process keeps patients moving and they feel much more satisfied by not having to wait around.

By the end of 2008, Heritage Valley Health System will post normal results to a patient portal on its website. Patients will receive an e-mail alerting them their tests have been completed and their results are posted for them to view online. Patients will then log onto the patient portal to view the results. If a physician wants to speak with a patient before releasing the results, the posted results will be delayed until after the physician and patients discuss the results.

Your doctor received your blood-test results electronically on a Mobile Clinical Access Portal (M-CAP), a secure, wireless hand-held device, about the size of a Blackberry phone that provides physicians with 3 years of on-line clinical data from any WIFI or Broadband connection point. But that’s not all. Let’s say, your blood work showed high levels of cholesterol and your doctor recommends that you take a statin drug to lower your cholesterol. But instead of writing a prescription for you to take to your pharmacy, he asks about your pharmacy of choice. You tell him, and he uses his M-CAP to electronically transmit your
prescription. The process is called e-prescribing. No paper script is needed. Your test information is stored safely and securely in an electronic health record at Heritage Valley.

And your doctor can retrieve that information with his M-CAP, whether he’s in the office, the hospital,
at home or watching a game at PNC Park. Your information is in the palm of his hand at the right time whenever he needs it. And let’s say that an unfortunate event lands you in the emergency department
of one of Heritage Valley’s hospitals. If that happens, your doctor is alerted immediately via the same hand-held device and he can immediately refresh himself on your patient information in your electronic health record.

Also, you’ll be interested to know that when the doctor sets the M-CAP down, it shuts itself off automatically, and the doctor can’t restore it to use without a password.

Seamless Integration of Patient Care
Heritage Valley achieved this technological sophistication thanks to the foresight of its board of directors. In the late 1990’s, board members recognized that a good deal of health care rides on having the right information, at the right place, at the right time. They understood this long before it became trendy even to talk about electronic health records.“We wanted to be a seamless, integrated, health care delivery system. And one of the ways to do that was to have a seamless, information technology infrastructure,” said Norman F. Mitry, President and CEO.

Thanks to this effort, Heritage Valley Health System can now electronically access patient records back to 1996, and can track lab results, radiology results, and medications throughout this 12-year period. Just as important, patients know that their data is secure. Data accuracy, availability and security in the system is paramount. Physicians want data to be timely, accurate, and in a format that they can read, understand, and use effectively and efficiently. And the whole process must be repeatable for them when and as they need to access patient data. The move to advance information technology coincided with the merger of the Beaver Campus with the Sewickley Campus in 1996 to create Heritage Valley Health System. With the merger, came an increased emphasis on faster, higher quality, safer patient care.

Since the merger, Heritage Valley Health System has grown into Western Pennsylvania’s premier, community-based, locally owned, independent health system. At the time of the merger, the Beaver campus employed approximately 2,000 people and generated about $140 million in annual revenue. The Sewickley Campus employed approximately 900 people with annual revenue of $90 million. Today, Heritage Valley Health System has 4,300 employees, more than 400 physicians serving patients in 65 free-standing offices, and generates $440 million in revenue. The system also has about 250,000 patient Care Cards in circulation and provides health care services in a 60-mile-diameter service area that extends as far north as Ellwood City, as far west as East Liverpool, Ohio, as far east as Cranberry Township, and as far south as McKees Rocks.

Heritage Valley Beaver is a 358-bed hospital located in Beaver, PA, approximately 20 miles north of the Pittsburgh International Airport. Heritage Valley Beaver’s affiliated physician groups include Tri-State Medical Group, Tri-State Obstetrics and Gynecology and Tri-State Pediatric Associates. Heritage Valley Sewickley, a 186-bed hospital located in Sewickley, PA, and Sewickley Valley Medical Group also are part of Heritage Valley Health System. Other facilities include the Staunton Clinic for mental health services, the Family Practice Center, the Heritage Valley Health Center, two Surgery Centers, Signature Rehab and the Women’s Health Center. The health system provides comprehensive health care for residents of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties in Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and the panhandle of West Virginia.

“As we say at Heritage Valley, we’re uniquely connected with our patients for life. We have two maternity units, at Beaver and Sewickley that together bring 2,000 new borns into the world every year and we offer end-of life care to our aging population as well. In fact, we offer everything our patients need, with the exception of advanced neurosurgery and transplantation,” said Mitry.

As a Six Sigma organization, Heritage Valley Health System continually follows a process-improvement strategy under the leadership of Rick Beaver, Vice President of Quality. Heritage Valley continually assesses its quality-improvement efforts. A good example of this initiative is the system of 44 kiosks for patient registration.

“Instead of just adding the kiosks to our existing registration system, we first reviewed the registration process and then built an entirely new registration process around patient use of these kiosks,” said Mitry.As a result of its information technology efforts, Heritage Valley Health System was recently named a finalist, with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Department of Anesthesiology and the Hospital Sao Sebastiano from Portugal in the 11th Microsoft Healthcare User Group (MS-HUG) Healthcare Innovation Awards 2008. Heritage Valley, with its development partner Athena Technologies, was recognized for their Mobile Clinical Access Portal (M-CAP).

With more than 4,700 members and 29 corporate supporters, the MS-HUG Healthcare Innovation Awards showcases how organizations use technology to enhance and transform the quality of patient care, reduce costs, streamline clinical and business processes, drive interoperability, improve productivity and workflow, and enable informed decisions.

To find out more about Heritage Valley Health System’s services and commitment to our region, log on to http://www.heritagevalley.org.mg