With a successful implementation at Bridgeport Hospital, a new real-time health care information system is about to take off nationally.
Based in Westport, SAMI Health Inc. has developed a web-based, searchable database that makes browsing patients”™ medical records and directions for treatment easier for health care professionals. The goal of the technology is to reduce medical errors and improve the quality of care given to patients.
“If medical errors were a disease, they would be the sixth largest killer of patients in the country,” said Matt Walton, SAMI Health CEO, quoting a recent Wall Street Journal article. “Sadly, medical errors occur all the time in every hospital, no matter how committed ”“ which they are ”“ to delivering high-quality care.”
About two years ago, Bridgeport Hospital, a member of the Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS), was the first to use SAMI at its 383-bed facility. Since adapting the technology, the hospital has been able to improve its performance-quality measures by 4.6 percent, said Michael Ivy, Bridgeport Hospital chief medical officer.
“An increase of 4 percent may not seem like a lot of improvement, but it is a tremendous improvement,” Ivy said. “(SAMI) helped us recognize issues when they were still fresh in everyone”™s minds, so we could find the actual problem and fix it.”
All from a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer, SAMI can continuously monitor data through various sources, spot problematic trends, suggest possible diagnoses, identify complications and alert providers to document errors. Hospital staff, such as physicians, pharmacists and coders, can create customized data functions using the technology. And patients are allowed access their own medical information, empowering them to participate in their care as well.
YNHHS is in the process of evaluating the technology to be used throughout its network and SAMI Health is in the midst of similar discussions with hospitals across the country.
In July, Bridgeport Hospital, Yale New Haven Hospital and affiliate Greenwich Hospital were named among the “most wired” in the nation by the American Hospital Association”™s trade magazine Hospitals and Health Networks.
For more than two years, hundreds of employees at YNHHS have worked to implement an electronic medical system (EMS), spending $250 million across its hospital network. SAMI works on top of any EMS and may be the network”™s next step. It takes less than 90 days to implement the technology and is as intuitive to use as a website, the company guarantees.
Current health care information systems are very complex, difficult to navigate and require multiple programs, Walton said. Whereas consumers can, within minutes, book a flight, hotel and transportation for a vacation all from the same website, the equivalent isn”™t possible when treating patients under the current standard technology.
“If you want to find out info on the patient you can”™t go browse ”˜Matt,”™” Walton said. “You can”™t easily say, ”˜Show me all the patients that are over 65, have a history of prostate cancer (and) are allergic to penicillin.”™ ”¦ That”™s a complicated question, not dissimilar to planning a vacation.”
“Health care has been very, very, very slow to adapt and embrace new technology,” he continued, mentioning the originally purpose of medical information systems was for billing. “We are very pleased and proud, frankly, to be one of the innovators out there.”
