In my many meetings with our colleagues, those comments reminded me of Dr. Kübler- Ross and her five stages of grief.

The changes in Medicine are producing the same grieving stages and will require the same work for us to come out healthy. Below is a self assessment to determine where each of us is and what effort will need to be done to be successful in completing that journey.

Read on 

MEDITECH and CPOM Update

Many physicians have shared with CHRISTUS Informatics concerns about processing time that slows physician workflow when using MEDITECH and CPOM.  Physicians have reported experiencing brief delays and the system not responding immediately when confirming and clicking a particular action. 

We wish to assure you that Regional leadership is fully aware of this critical issue, and its urgency has been shared with corporate Information Management (IM).  We are pleased to report that an intense effort is now underway to respond to and improve the physician user experience based on the feedback you have provided.  Some of the key efforts engaged by CHRISTUS IM involve:

• Completing the migration of the MEDITECH software to a new dedicated and more reliable environment.  The recent problems with this migration are being addressed with all possible resources and CHRISTUS IM continues to monitor and optimize MEDITECH's new home.
• Investments are being made in external consultants from CISCO and IBM who are in the process of finalizing a comprehensive evaluation of the CHRISTUS IT infrastructure and providing reports and recommendations to corporate IM.
• Additional long-term recommendations are being developed in order to provide for easier expansion of advanced clinical technologies.
• Evaluation of Virtual Desktop solutions using dedicated workstations or terminals to provide a faster processing experience is being actively explored.
• Efforts have been engaged to simplify Log in so as to provide faster and secure physician sign-on, for example using a badge on a reader, while maintaining critical information security requirements as mandated by HIPAA.

We will continue to provide progress reports on these efforts and share your feedback with CHRISTUS IM in order to drive significant improvement of your user experience and processing time.
 
Thank you for your continued support and partnership in optimizing Meditech and CPOM.  For any questions or concerns please contact George Gellert, Regional Medical Informatics Officer.

Modified Early Warning Scores (MEWS) are commonly used for the assessment of hospital patients in non-Intensive care units. The Early Warning Score is a simple scoring system that can be calculated using parameters which are measured for all acute patients. It can be used to quickly identify patients who are clinically deteriorating and who need urgent intervention.

MEWS is now being used to monitor medical and surgical patients over 18 years of age, in each of the CHRISTUS Santa Rosa adult facilities.  The score is entered in the EMR.

The use of MEWS has been shown to be effective in reducing mortality and morbidity of patients who deteriorate slowly.  Care should be taken to recognize certain patients that have elevated MEWS scores due to chronic conditions such as COPD or renal failure. These patients may have a MEWS of 3 or 4 as a baseline number.

The physician and the nurse should collaborate on what would be a significant score for that patient. The trend over time should identify patients that may be at risk.