Centra receives national recognition again for use of information technology in delivering excellent patient care

For the second time this month, Centra has received a major national award for its use of information technology in its delivery of excellent patient care to the region.

On Tuesday, Centra received a national 2008 VIP Award from McKesson Technology Solutions for its use of information technology to achieve outstanding results in the delivery of health care. This award comes just days after Centra was named one of the Most Wired Hospitals and Health Systems in the country by H&HN (Hospitals & Health Networks) magazine.

"These awards are an extraordinary honor for Centra," said George W. Dawson, Centra president and CEO, "and the hard work of all Centra employees and staff who have embraced information technology as a tool for implementing quality and patient safety. Technology touches every patient, physician, employee and volunteer throughout Centra. We are very pleased to once again be recognized as a national leader."

The VIP Awards are presented annually to organizations that exhibit vision, innovation and performance in the use of health care IT. Centra is one of six health care organizations selected this year by a panel of judges Ð who are considered experts in the field of healthcare IT use Ð to receive the award.

Earlier this month, Centra was recognized as one of the top 100 most wired hospitals in the nation in the July issue of H&HN magazine, the journal of the American Hospital Association. The magazine surveys health care systems annually on the effective use of information technology in achieving clinical and operational excellence. Hospitals report on how they use information technology in five key areas: safety and quality, customer service, business processes, workforce and public health and safety.

Centra is a leader in using information technology to enter doctor's orders, safely provide medications with barcode technology, document and store clinical test results and using database analytics to improve care.

Centra was selected as a VIP Award winner for a simultaneous technology deployment of 24 new applications that integrated clinical and financial processes. The endeavor not only created financial savings, it created a safer and more efficient clinical environment.

Like many health systems, Centra was using and maintaining technology from numerous vendors across its hospitals, creating inefficiencies. To help control costs and further empower clinicians to deliver the best care possible, Centra chose to upgrade its clinical and financial applications with one vendor as a partner Ð McKesson, a health care services and information technology company.

"Our goal was to leverage the best of all applications by designing, building and testing all the clinical and business processes together," said Ben Clark, Centra chief information officer and vice president.

"Our journey has not just been about automating processes as they previously existed," Dawson said, "but also improving them and using that data to analyze and improve how we give care. By migrating our system to a largely digital approach, patient information is more readily available to the care team, the care process is accelerated, and we've created a safer environment."

With the advanced clinical applications in place, Centra's care team now has instant access to patient information whenever and wherever they need it. Nurses also use a bar-code scanning solution as a final check before administering medication to patients to help ensure the "five rights": right patient, right medication, right time, right route and right dose. Additionally, Centra's new operational processes and information systems have helped the hospital improve financial performance.

"Every year, McKesson's VIP Award winners raise the bar for what it means to deliver outstanding health care," said Michael Brozino, vice president of marketing, McKesson Provider Technologies. "It's rewarding for us to see how organizations like Centra are using the power of information technology to deliver more efficient and more effective care for their patients."

VIP Award applicants underwent a rigorous judging process based on six weighted criteria: definition of the business objective, quality of the process used to make improvements, use of McKesson solution in enabling the improvement, impact on clinical and/or financial issues, improvement in service to the community, and the method used to measure results.

For more information, please visit www.centrahealth.com.