IT integration key to St. Mary's recognition

When Chicago-based Verispan decided that St.

Mary's Health Network of Reno again ranked among the top 100 health-care systems in the country, the researchers gave a lot of weight to a surprising aspect of St.

Mary's business its information technology systems.

In fact, the way that technology is integrated into the operation of a health-care system accounts for 15 percent of the grade assigned by Verispan as it examines 578 hospital systems nationwide.

Nothing could make Chris Smith happier.

Smith, vice president and chief information officer at St.

Mary's, oversees a multi million dollar, eight-year effort to link the hospital's data systems into a seamless whole.

By the time Smith and his team are done, doctors who log into the system and write an order for a patient will know that their instructions are routed instantly to the hospital's pharmacy, laboratories, kitchens and elsewhere.

Rooms filled with files of medical records probably will be gone from St.

Mary's within two or three years.

The job, an outgrowth of a technological vision created by hospital officials in 1996 and 1997, has moved step-bystep through hospital departments.

Next up is linking the pharmacy, followed by the big job of bringing physicians online.

Physicians, like other professionals who work at St.

Mary's, will be asked to help design the system.

Smith knows, for instance, that the new system can automatically issue cautions about drug interactions when a doctor writes a prescription but doctors will decide the rules by which the cautions are issued.

"This is not our system," Smith said of the hospital's data-processing team.

"This is a clinical system.We have clinical people driving the process."

The involvement of users is important, too, in helping overcome resistance from users who like their current processes.

In some instance, Smith acknowledged, the software used by an individual department may have features superior to the software used in the integrated system.

That requires managers to show how the benefits of a system that integrates the entire St.

Mary's organization outweigh features of individual software packages.

"This is a lot more difficult culturally than it is technologically," Smith said.

Because the process has unfolded over more than five years, he said employees of some of the departments who were first to adopt the integrated systems became champions of the conversion elsewhere in the hospital.

While cost-savings are likely to result from an integrated data system, Smith said St.

Mary's didn't enter into the project for financial reasons.

"We're not driven by that," he said.

"We're driven by improving patient care and patient safety."

Cerner Corp.

of Kansas City is the primary software for the St.

Mary's project.