Vendor Spotlight: GE Healthcare Provides Clinicians a ‘Gateway’ to Patient Vital Signs

By:  Donna Carroll, Editor, The MEDITECH Community Bulletin

A member of HCA’s TriStar Health System family of hospitals across Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, Skyline Medical Center is a two-campus facility offering a comprehensive range of high quality medical services. Skyline Medical Center’s main campus is located on a 59-acre site on the highest point in Davidson County, overlooking downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The 196-bed state-of-the-art facility features all private patient rooms and offers the most advanced medical and surgical technologies available along with personalized patient and family-based care.

In The TriStar family of hospitals, a commitment to healthcare technology and innovative new procedures is nothing new. They have been dedicated to finding better surgical procedures and to improving hospital systems for decades. In fact, today the hospitals that make up the TriStar family are recognized leaders in technology.

At the heart of TriStar hospitals’ healthcare technology is MEDITECH’s hospital information system, known throughout all HCA-owned facilities as Clinical Patient Care System (CPCS). CPCS is the electronic medical record system (EMR) that allows for sharing of patient clinical information with physicians and other providers involved in their care. CPCS eliminates the need to transport medical records from one facility to another or from one physician office to another. Physicians can access records in the hospital, in their office or in their home. With all patient clinical information in CPCS, the benefit to patients is that physicians and clinicians have access to patients’ entire medical picture, making it easier to diagnose and treat quickly.

Like most facilities, however, Skyline Medical Center faced a challenge when it came to documenting patient vital signs in CPCS (MEDITECH). Rynda Christensen, RN, Senior Systems Analyst, explains how retrieving information from patient monitors was done in the traditional way, "In order to get data from the monitor, the nurses would have to print a piece of paper, then sit down and manually enter it into our documentation system. It was very time-consuming." She continued, "And if you have a doctor sitting in his office and he wants to see what’s going on it’s only as accurate as the last person’s data entry."

To help address this challenge, the hospital integrated GE Healthcare’s Aware Gateway in two of its Intensive Care Units (ICUs). GE Healthcare's Aware Gateway is a bi-directional interface between GE patient monitors and the hospital information system (MEDITECH). This link enables nurses to review and confirm patient monitoring information that is then automated and sent to the rest of the hospital environment. Physicians are able to view the information almost instantly, from anywhere they can access the patient record, and use the data to make clinical decisions. Nurses are also able to spend more time at the patient’s bedside as opposed to spending hours documenting patient information.

Ms. Christensen, a long-time HCA employee, was working at Skyline Medical Center for seven years when the hospital sought a solution to streamline this process and improve workflow efficiency. She was a member of the Aware Gateway implementation team, comprised of ICU nurses, IT&S staff, and vendor representatives. Hospital Administration first expressed an interest in implementing the solution and Skyline became the pilot site for HCA to implement Aware Gateway in two of its ICUs. Since then, a few other HCA facilities have implemented Aware Gateway, with several others currently in the process of rolling out the product.

Ms. Christensen noted that communication was crucial to the success of the project. There needed to be constant communication with the users about the intent of the project—how it would improve their daily work routine. Nurses were consulted for their input regarding workflow issues and screen design.

Celecia Cutts, RN, Clinical Coordinator for critical care and neuroscience at Skyline, also referenced increased communication between nurses and physicians as a resulting benefit of the implementation. She explained that physicians can now receive the information on their handheld device or computer, helping to speed clinical decision making and leading to improved communication with nurses.

Nurses also found the system to be user-friendly and more efficient. While a few were initially resistant to the change, staff quickly adapted to the technology once they saw how easy it was to use.

About GE Healthcare’s Aware Gateway:

The Aware Gateway interface offers easy, bi-directional transfer of data between a Hospital Information System (HIS) or Clinical Information System (CIS) and patient monitors using the HL7 protocol standard.

• The Aware Gateway interface automatically sends trended vital sign data to almost any charting system, saving time, increasing nurse productivity, and providing a more complete picture of the patient’s condition.

• In addition, admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) data captured by a HIS/CIS is sent to the monitoring system, eliminating time and errors associated with manual data entry. The system transfers a growing list of over 285 vital parameters to the hospital’s HIS from bedside monitors and third party peripheral devices and reduces errors and lost time associated with manual entry of patient information at the bedside during admission.

• Aware Gateway collects data from up to 250 GE Healthcare monitoring devices connected to the Unity Network®, and seamlessly interfaces to HIS/CIS from leading vendors including GE Centricity®, Meditech®, Cerner®, Epic®, Visicu® and others.

To learn more about Aware Gateway and GE Healthcare’s monitoring solutions, visit them online at www.gehealthcare.com/us.

To learn more about Skyline Medical Center, TriStar Health System, or HCA, visit them online at www.skylinemedicalcenter.com, www.tristarhealth.com, or www.hcahealthcare.com.