All Together, Cerner and Its Clients Help Make Millions Safer Every Year
In 2006, Cerner Corp. (NASDAQ: CERN) together with its 6,000 clients worldwide helped make nearly 50 million patient encounters safer. This week, 25 of those clients will provide interactive demonstrations from the viewpoint of various clinician roles on how their healthcare organizations use Cerner healthcare information technology to improve clinical and financial outcomes at the Health Information Management System Society (HIMSS) 2007 conference in New Orleans.
“When you look at how information technology is used in healthcare organizations, it is not about gadgets and gizmos. It is about ensuring that the right knowledge at a healthcare organization is shared based on the condition of the patient, the role of the clinician and venue where the treatment is taking place,” said Neal Patterson, Cerner chairman and CEO. “At Cerner, we work hand-in-hand with our clients to ensure our solutions are designed with that foremost in mind.
“With the release of Cerner Millennium® 2007 last fall, we utilized unprecedented levels of feedback from more than 100 clinicians at client sites about our unique Role-Venue- Condition design philosophy that ultimately shaped the release.”
Cerner Millennium, the company’s unified software architecture, combines technology with knowledge to allow healthcare professionals to service the entire continuum of a patient’s care — from check-in through treatment, remitting of bills and follow-up care — all through a single, connected information system. At each point of care, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, billing agents and all involved healthcare professionals have secure access to the role-appropriate and venue-appropriate information they need.
At HIMSS 2007, executives and clinicians from a variety of healthcare organizations will guide attendees at the Cerner booth through a specific patient condition, highlighting how Cerner Millennium solutions adapt to the various clinician roles and venues. As part of the presentations, clients will demonstrate in their own domains their organization’s experiences and illustrate how they have achieved clinical, operational and financial benefits from their Cerner solutions suite.
Three of the presenters include St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Tri-City Medical Center and University of New Mexico Hospital:
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. is one of the world’s premier centers for research and treatment of catastrophic childhood diseases in children. St. Jude will present the oncology condition (protocol management and clinical trials), where a four-year-old child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia is in the hospital for chemotherapy. In this presentation, St. Jude will show complex order sets, pharmacy entry of medication orders, positive patient identification (PPID) and bar-coded labels for medication administration and specimen collections, integration between CPOE and patient scheduling and patient registration. St. Jude has achieved a decrease in mislabels by 92 percent by utilizing bedside specimen collection and PPID.
Roles: Admitting, physician, pharmacist, nurse, scheduler, radiology
Venues: Hospital admitting, acute care from admission through chemotherapy to discharge, clinic return for ambulatory visit, pharmacy, retail pharmacy and radiology
Condition: Oncology
Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, Calif. is a community hospital and an Excellence in Healthcare 4-Star Award winner, reported by Professional Research Consultants, placing it in the top 25 percent of participating hospitals. The clinician team from Tri-City will provide an overview of how they meet and exceed Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) Core Measure compliance around a pneumonia case, from emergency room to inpatient. Tri-City has improved turn around times for processing and providing medications from more than 60 minutes to just 12 minutes.
Roles: ED Physician, Acute Care Physician, ED Nurse, Acute Care Nurse
Venues: Emergency to Acute Care
Condition: Pneumonia
University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, N.M. was recently selected as one of the “100 Most Wired Hospitals and Health Systems” in the United States and ranked among the top ten academic centers in the nation. The clinical team from the University of New Mexico will focus on disease and pain management, demonstrating how physicians manage their day and the myriad situations they face with the aid of a unified electronic medical record. The hospital has seen a 67 percent decrease in turnaround time for release-of-information requests.
Roles: Physician (Ambulatory and Acute Care), Pharmacy, HIM
Venues: Physician Office, Physician Acute care, Pharmacy, HIM
Condition: Disease and Pain Management
These are just some examples of how, every day, physicians and nurses from thousands of healthcare facilities around the world provide safe, efficient and effective healthcare using Cerner solutions built on the unified architecture of Cerner Millennium. All together, our more than 7,500 associates, including almost 900 clinicians, help client organizations of every size increase safety, improve efficiency and impact the bottom line.
To see client presentations, please visit the Cerner booth (# 2440) at the HIMSS 2007 conference in New Orleans (Feb. 26 — March 1).
About Cerner
Cerner Corp. is taking the paper chart out of healthcare, eliminating error, variance and waste in the care process. With more than 6,000 clients worldwide, Cerner is the leading supplier of healthcare information technology. The following are trademarks of Cerner: Cerner, Cerner Millennium, Cerner’s logo. NASDAQ: CERN. www.cerner.com.