Electronic Patient Care Switches On

Dell Computer Corp. is helping Jewish Hospital HealthCare Services (JHHS) manage patient care electronically at JHHS's new 210,000-sq-ft medical center in Louisville, KY. Jewish Hospital Medical Center East has selected Dell as its technology provider. The company is supplying Dell OptiPlex GX260 slim desktops and Dell Latitude C640 and C840 notebooks. These systems will support electronic medical records, wireless patient-tracking devices, and filmless medical imaging.

"Everything in the center was designed with the patient in mind," says David Pecoraro, JHHS's CIO. "The information technology at the center incorporates advanced clinical applications that provide higher-quality, more-accurate, nearly paperless administration of medical care."

Dell's technology is also allowing doctors to show patients medical imaging and lab results in their rooms. The hospital can also electronically maintain patient records and record vital signs and surgery documentation from preoperation to recovery.
JHHS is also working on a program in which nurses will use a bar code gun to scan bar coded drugs, their identification tags, and patient tags to verify that the drug is being administered to the correct patient. JHHS expects this program to go live later this summer.

One challenge for JHHS, though, is that many drugs arrive at the hospital without bar codes. "We want more bar codes on prepackaged drugs," says Pecoraro. "If the bar code is not on the packages, we have to repackage them with a bar code." To do so, JHHS has to purchase what Pecoraro calls an "expensive packaging machine for stamping packages with a bar code.'