The Pilot News - CHB awarded $500,000 grant

The HRSA Rural Health Network Development Grant will be awarded in three phases over the next three years.
For the first phase, the hospital will implement mobile devices for clinical documentation.
“Any reports that are dictated in the facility will now be on the system. Currently they are not. This includes radiology, therapy, physicals . . . They will be much more readily accessible.”
The new equipment will come from MediTech, the hospital’s current vendor, and will complement the technology already in plcace.
“We’re building on the existing platform for the hospital system,” Barrett said. “We have a wireless network throughout the hospital. Part of the grant money is for wireless devices. We already have our wireless medication carts that have barcode scanners on them.”
The portable medication administration carts were purchased with previous grant money.
“Now we will have the software,” Barrett explained. “A big piece of that is patient safety. We will be able to scan the patient’s barcoded wristband and the system will check that this is the right patient and the right medication. It will automatically alert the nurse if it detects a problem.”
Patient records will become electronic, which makes them easier to share with specialists, family physicians and other hospitals if necessary.
“Now a physician can get that information electronically. Instead of things happening in paper fashion, it can be more real time, electronically through a secure portal.”
The second and third phases of the grant will provide electronic medical record capabilities to three local doctors’ offices — Community Family Physicians, Dr. John Larsen and Dr. Jason Marker.
“The idea is that the information would all flow together,” Barrett explained. “Rather than having a lot of paper charts, the information is stored electronically. The physician could get on the system and see what’s going on with the patient. We will have a secure web portal for physicians to be able to access patient information.”
In addition, physicians would keep patient records and medical history up-to-date by entering data taken in their own offices.
“The physicians would have electronic access in their offices. They will be able to put their documentation in from the offices electronically.”
Barrett is pleased the grant included the local network of family physicians.
“We want the physicians to have a good, useful tool so that we can help them to better follow their patients and also improve their health outcome.”
The grant provides for three of four family doctor practices in Bremen and Wyatt. The fourth — Dr. Robert Kolbe and Dr. Gregory Buck of Bremen Family Medicine — already has an electronic medical record system through their affiliation with St. Joe Med Center.
Barrett applied for the grant last fall and learned of the $500,000 award last Friday, April 25.
“We will literally start our work almost immediately on this,” she said. “The very first thing will be organizational meetings to develop a project timeline with specific steps and the order that they will happen. We’ll determine where we’re going to go from here.”
The grant will also provide personnel funding to allow the hospital to hire an additional IT person. Currently, the hospital’s Information Technology Department consists of Barrett and the network administrator, Brant Hesch.
“It’s key to us to have an additional person,” she said.
Barrett is pleased with the progress Community Hospital has made in the realm of technology.
“When I started 10 years ago, the hospital didn’t even have its own servers. We’ve come light years from where we used to be.”