Roswell Park Cancer Institute Automates Business Processes

Installing a new healthcare management system at a busy hospital is never easy, and for Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., the project was especially challenging. With CSC's help, Roswell successfully implemented the first phase of a state-of-the-art solution that is providing many positive benefits, including improved business processes and workflows. The project also serves as a good example of how effective teamwork can help achieve success.

Founded in 1898 as America's first cancer center, Roswell Park is a leading provider of inpatient and outpatient cancer treatment services and the only facility in upstate New York to hold the designation of "comprehensive cancer center." This means Roswell Park not only has to deal with the day-to-day realities of providing top-notch cancer care, the center also has to stay on the cutting edge as a leading cancer research and educational facility.

The specific needs of the center's wide range of constituents, from physicians to faculty to researchers, made the requirements for a new IT system much more complex and demanding than those of a typical hospital. For one, Roswell Park physicians wanted to treat ambulatory care patients more efficiently and they were concerned about implementing correct checks and balances in the medication administration loop. In addition, Roswell wanted to move beyond the manual paper-based way of doing things and reap the many benefits an electronic-based system brings.

Improved workflows, higher efficiency

In an effort to improve business operations and patient care, the center turned to a state-of-the-art solution developed by Eclipsys, a leading healthcare software vendor. CSC provided consulting management services for the implementation of Eclipsys' Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM), and worked closely with Roswell Park's leadership team to successfully deliver the first phase of the project on time and on budget.

Eclipsys SCM is designed to manage and support business operations such as electronic medical record management, clinical documentation, order entry and medication administration. Prior to the implementation, CSC assessed the center's workflow to identify high priority process work steps to enhance patient safety and improve efficiencies.

JoAnne Ruh, Roswell Park's vice president, information systems, says CSC's key tasks were to document the current state of clinical processes, highlight risk areas and document Roswell's future state after full automation. At the outset, CSC helped identify redundancies in the clinical workflow. "The first phase of the EMR (electronic medical record) implementation went up without a hitch," Ruh says. "We also made many improvements that didn't directly involve automation, but did smooth out procedures in our clinics."

A large percentage of the cancer patients at Roswell Park are treated in ambulatory and clinical settings after a brief inpatient stay. Frequently, patients could be assigned to a treatment regimen that requires daily visits to Roswell for chemotherapy or transfusion services. It is important that the most recent results of diagnostic tests and medication history are available prior to treatment. Thus, the EMR and any new workflows had to support the dynamic and precarious environment.

CSC's role was to provide project management and process redesign services for the Eclipsys SCM solution. With Eclipsys, many clinical processes that were previously performed manually, such as medication administration, are now automated. "The physicians are just embracing it," says Ruh. "This phase is working very well. In fact, they want us to step up the pace for CPOE (computerized physician order entry) and structure documentation."

Jerry Howell, a partner with CSC's Global Health Solutions, says the executive leadership at Roswell Park wanted to adjust how they looked at technology. "With this project, Roswell drove hard to achieve clinical benefits. Roswell had a good track record of implementing technology, but hadn't always achieved the benefits desired."

Howell says part of the solution was to combine technology best practices with clinical best practices. "Roswell understood that this was a broad clinical project as opposed to an IT project," he says. "We wanted to avoid the trap of implementing new technology on top of antiquated business and clinical processes. Our goal was to combine process improvement with the implementation of new technology."

As project manager, CSC had to keep a tight rein on time, resources and scope. The biggest challenge was to keep everything on schedule. "It was all by-the-book," Howell explains. "We were very disciplined about the tracking and reporting of progress against a detailed work plan, as well as addressing problems and issues as they surfaced."

Teamwork brings success

As part of a multidisciplinary approach to the project, CSC developed strategies to make sure Roswell Park's faculty and physicians were fully engaged with the process redesign. Ruh says it was common to demonstrate the system's capabilities in team meetings and solicit direct feedback on what staff members were looking for.

More importantly, Ruh says, "The project not only has executive buy-in, the top leadership intimately knows how to use the system. We spent many hours demonstrating components of the system to initiate our leadership to the ins and outs of the system. We did not just have a figurehead steering committee." Ruh says this familiarity has been a key to the success of the project. When a question or issue comes up, she says, "We can deliberate, because we all know the system so well."

Howell characterizes the project as a "great client/CSC/vendor partnership," and the success achieved because of the close teamwork has not gone unnoticed. At the 2006 Eclipsys User Network Annual Conference, Roswell Park received the Teamwork Award in the Very Impressive Performance (VIP) Awards category. The award recognizes the center's outstanding leadership and innovation in the implementation of the system. "We had involvement from the president all the way down to the aides," adds Ruh.

Para obtener más información:

contacte con nosotros.