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Nationally Recognized Quality Care Leader, Saint Vincent Health System, Selects Theradoc to Enhance Infection Control Programs

Posted on: Monday, 10 December 2007, 06:00 CST

TheraDoc® (www.theradoc.com), a Salt Lake City-based medical informatics company, has been selected by Saint Vincent Health System, a fully integrated health care delivery network, for implementation at Saint Vincent Health Center, a 436-bed, not-for-profit, tertiary care hospital and regional medical center located in Erie, PA. Saint Vincent will utilize TheraDoc's patented solutions to provide real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support to augment Saint Vincent's well-established infection monitoring and control programs.

With the addition of Saint Vincent Health Center, TheraDoc technology will soon be implemented at 30 Pennsylvania hospitals, including facilities from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, West Penn Allegheny Health System in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia's Jefferson Health System.

Saint Vincent Health System, nationally recognized as a health care quality leader by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), and The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), has chosen to implement the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) along with the Infection Control Assistant® (ICA).

TheraDoc's ESP technology leverages real-time clinical data from multiple sources within the hospital, including information from ADT, microbiology, lab, pharmacy, radiology, and surgery. The ICA combines a complete workflow tool for infection control practitioners (ICPs) with its continuous surveillance, intelligent alerts and timely analysis of individual infections and outbreaks. This helps ICPs to prevent infections, better manage isolations and precautions, more quickly find and confirm infections, more efficiently conduct MRSA screening protocols, identify trends and initiate interventions. This access to more-timely and better information coupled with knowledge provides automated and enhanced internal and external electronic reporting, and eliminates hours of manual tasks resulting in improved patient safety and quality of care, as well as better financial outcomes.

Over the past 15 years, Saint Vincent Health System has been successful in reducing the number of infectious disease outbreaks using technology developed in-house. In striving to further improve its infection control programs, however, the organization looked to the marketplace for the latest technology.

"When we conducted our review, TheraDoc presented the only solution that truly enhanced our current capacity to monitor, manage, prevent and report hospital-acquired infections (HAIs)," said Howard Nadworny, MD, hospital epidemiologist, Division of Infectious Diseases at Saint Vincent Health System. "Their robust, real-time technology and reporting systems will also allow our ICPs to spend less time on surveillance and more time on intervention."

"Our infection control nurses at Saint Vincent are constantly inundated with paperwork and truly need ways to streamline processes for effective infection control programs," adds Saint Vincent Infection Control Coordinator Terry Kalgren, RN, BSN, CIC. "TheraDoc technology not only significantly reduces this paperwork, it also allows us to customize reports to meet the requirements of PHC4 and the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN)."

In Pennsylvania, hospitals are required to report all types of HAIs, as well as other related quality-of-care measures, to both NHSN and PHC4. These state mandates also require electronic surveillance systems to be compatible with NHSN, a compliance that TheraDoc meets by incorporating NHSN infection definitions into its system for reporting and identification of infections.

Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO, said, "We are privileged to implement our technology to further improve patient safety measures at Saint Vincent Health System. TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best practice solutions in our effort to improve patient safety and care, along with financial outcomes for healthcare institutions and their patients."

As of December 1, 2007, a rapidly increasing list of client hospitals, including a significant number of the country's premiere healthcare organizations in 29 states and the District of Columbia, were licensed for TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance and clinical decision support to 1.9 million inpatient admissions and 26+ million outpatient visits. Clients using TheraDoc technology range from community hospitals with under 100 beds to integrated delivery networks (IDNs) with more than 3,700 beds, academic and VA medical centers, as well as children's and oncology specialty hospitals.

About Saint Vincent Health System

Saint Vincent Health System is a fully integrated health care delivery network that includes a 400+ bed hospital in Erie, Pa., as its flagship; a 32-bed hospital in Westfield, NY; the region's busiest same-day surgery center; a medical group made up of 32 practices and specialty clinics; a home health care program; and an outpatient imaging center. Saint Vincent is committed to compassion and excellence in the delivery of a continuum of world-class, holistic health care.

About Saint Vincent Health Center

Saint Vincent Health Center, selected as one of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania, is a 436-bed not-for-profit tertiary care facility located in Erie, Pa. Saint Vincent, founded in 1875 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Northwestern Pennsylvania as the area's first hospital, is now the region's third-largest employer, with 2,900 employees. Saint Vincent has earned national recognition as a health care quality leader by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, and The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. The hospital has consistently scored in the top ten percent among hospitals in the nation on a number of quality measures.

About TheraDoc, Inc.

TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinicians' fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops, and supports a suite of clinical decision support technologies, all of which utilize a proprietary inference engine that enables its real-time capabilities. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Source: Business Wire

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