From patient registration to diagnostic tests, Anne Arundel Medical Center is moving to an electronic medical records system, joining the trend of Maryland hospitals going paperless.
“Many of our hospitals are going in that direction, probably 80 percent,” said Maryland Hospital Association spokeswoman Nancy Fiedler.
“Everybody approaches it a little differently,” she said, adding that the level of adoption varies among hospitals, with some being more electronic than others.
Anne Arundel Medical Center will transition to the electronic system this spring, with plans to be fully implemented in November, hospital officials announced this week. The system should improve patient safety by reducing errors and making all physician orders and patient information automated.
At Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, officials began an electronic system in 2004, and now about 300 physicians frequently access clinical information, said Tressa Springmann, GBMC’s chief information officer and vice president.
“These systems are a journey, and you keep adding to them,” she said.
Information is either entered into the system directly or scanned in. Some tasks, such as ordering medications, are still done on paper, but Springmann said she was optimistic the hospital would one day be entirely paperless.
“I absolutely believe that until we get to that place, we will continue to have inefficiencies in the system,” she said.
LifeBridge Health, which operates Sinai Hospital in Baltimore and Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, has been on the forefront of this technology, ranking in the top 5 percent of hospitals nationwide that were surveyed by an industry organization for their adoption of electronic records.
“The goal is to improve care,” said Karen Barker, LifeBridge’s chief information officer.
However, as more hospitals move to electronic systems, there still aren’t any standards to ensure the systems are compatible with each other, Fiedler said. So, if a patient with a doctor at one hospital visits the emergency room of another, the electronic records won’t transfer, she said.
As a part of health care reform, the federal government should set these standards, she said.
“It’s the ideal way to go from a patient safety standpoint, but it’s just a matter of how to do it,” Fiedler said.
Hospitals also have to make sure they properly train the staff, she said. At Anne Arundel, officials included $3.6 million to provide training.
The other catch is the cost of the systems, which can be prohibitive for many private practice community doctors, officials said. Without individual doctors’ offices adopting the system, not all data can be electronic and easily transferred between clinics and offices.
“The hardest part is getting the physicians’ offices to participate,” Barker said.
One solution to this is the creation of personal health records, which are held by the patient, Barker said. Hospitals and doctors’ offices could add to or access information in those electronic records.
“The goal,” she said, “is that all the people that provide care for a patient are on the same page about what is going on with the patient.”
