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Remote IT System Support Minimizes Downtime and Maximizes Care By Dan Williams Clinical Information Systems Administrator Saint Francis Medical Center Cape Girardeau, Mo.  We Cannot Do it Alone Like many other healthcare organizations around the country, Saint Francis Medical Center is busy converting and upgrading our information technology (IT) systems so that we can achieve meaningful use by 2012. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides more than $19 billion for adoption and meaningful use of an integrated electronic health record and other clinical decision support systems. This means we need to manage multiple IT implementation projects to ensure we are ready to qualify for funds and avoid future penalties. At the same time, our progressive, innovative regional tertiary care referral center has doubled in size over the past five years to meet the healthcare needs of our multi-state service area — Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. Stimulus funding is critical to achieving our ongoing mission to provide patients with leading-edge treatment, advanced technology and compassionate care. It is important we are ready. As we worked toward implementation and integration of our new solutions, we engaged McKesson's dedicated SystemCare IT support services. Initially, we thought we would keep the services for a year or two as we trained our internal staff to take over. But soon we realized we could not do it alone. Comprehensive operating system support is essential to supplement our internal resources, optimize our technology strategies, and provide safe and efficient patient care. Proactive Monitoring Improves Productivity Part of our system services is proactive monitoring. This service sends e-mail alerts if something is wrong with one of our systems. Potential problems are identified and fixed before they occur, enabling us to avoid downtime or a slowdown in performance. A slow system is almost as bad as no system at all. The services also ensure high availability of the applications and systems, and expedited disaster recovery if a system goes down. For example, when McKesson's support specialists noticed that some of our users were having performance issues, they sent additional memory for our servers. This solved the problem before we even experienced performance slowdown. Without proactive monitoring, we would have to hire outside help to fix every glitch that occurs — after it happened. With less downtime and much faster response time in resolving issues, staff satisfaction is high. Our clinicians have faith in the system — a confidence that carries over to their care of patients. Protecting Patient Safety with Reliability Keeping the system healthy makes life easier for our clinicians as well. When databases are down, no one can work efficiently. Functioning systems are vital to patient care. A computer crash causes havoc for caregivers. Suddenly, they do not have the tools they rely on to monitor patients. Safety mechanisms such as bar-code scanning for medication administration are not in place. Patients are never in any danger, but quality is hindered. With our databases and servers at peak operating performance, we protect patients and enhance their care. Do patients make the direct link between this level of quality and smoothly operating IT systems? Probably not, but our patient satisfaction scores are always high. And we believe there is a connection. Getting Our Money's Worth Comprehensive system support has saved us money. With remote system administration, we no longer need to employ a database administrator. Conversions and upgrades are covered, so we do not have to hire outside consultants or buy more equipment. Our IT staff is freed up to work on other projects within the department and support our users. But where we really benefit is in having an expert manage our database servers — the most critical parts of our system. Data is the key to operating efficiently and providing safe care. By maintaining the database to ensure availability, reliability and accuracy, we can ensure we are using the optimum data to make decisions on strategic initiatives, operations and care delivery. Maintaining this complex technology exceeds our internal capabilities. Engaging external IT services is valuable for accomplishing the extensive IT upgrades most healthcare organizations will need to perform to achieve meaningful use and qualify for stimulus funding in 2012. The recent large upgrade of our clinical solutions is a case in point. We were able to rely on McKesson to repurpose all of our hardware and restage our entire clinical infrastructure. Now our staff is able to focus on initiatives other than system management and maintenance. Plus, with round-the-clock care of our system and proactive monitoring, we feel confident in the high availability of our systems. For those facing a similar extensive overhaul of systems, you may want to consider outsourcing system services. As Clinical Systems Administrator at Saint Francis Medical Center, Dan Williams has played a key role in the implementation of the McKesson suite of products, including documentation, orders, pharmacy and physician portal. He has more than 25 years of experience in healthcare IT, including computer consultant, programmer and manager for the wholesale drug industry.   |
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