Project Details -
Completed
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Grant NumberUC1 HS015284
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AHRQ Funded Amount$1,500,000
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Principal Investigator(s)
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Organization
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LocationWest BendWisconsin
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Project Dates09/30/2004 - 09/29/2008
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Care Setting
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Type of Care
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Health Care Theme
In an effort to improve patient safety and quality of care within our own facility, and to contribute to overall improvement of patient safety and quality of care in the health care industry, St. Joseph's primary goal was to implement an Epic system, in a clearly developed and documented manner benefitted other small hospitals. This project builded on research and discussion around patient safety and quality of care at our national Learning Lab held in Milwaukee in 2002. This Learning Lab was attended by nationally recognized patient safety leadership representing leaders from organizations active in patent safety. Community-wide diffusion of the Epic system began at our current small hospital as the lead partners and transferred to our new facility upon completion of construction and extend to multiple clinic sites, a community retail pharmacy, a new residential hospice facility and an 18-bed skilled nursing sub-acute care facility. We documented our safety-driven design principles and discussed the role Epic has in meeting these design principles, either directly or indirectly. Further, we designed around precarious events, specifically medication errors, by identifying the prevalence of medication errors, near misses and preventable adverse drug events in our current manual patient record and with our community partners systems and then again after Epic is implemented. We measured the length of stay, cost per case-mixed adjusted DRG and customer satisfaction in the old system and then again after Epic was implemented. Finally, we developed and document a clear health IT implementation report that can be utilized by AHRQ, other small community hospitals, and research organizations.