This article was originally posted on MedcityNews by Erin Dietsche.
Phoenix Children’s Hospital is reaping the benefits of its clinical documentation-focused collaboration with Medicomp Systems, a computer software company headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia.
Vinay Vaidya, Phoenix Children’s vice president and CMIO, said the beginning of the relationship with Medicomp was serendipitous. He and a colleague first learned about the company at HIMSS four years ago.
After that initial meeting, the hospital went on to implement Medicomp’s Quippe clinical documentation system. Now, Phoenix Children’s says the tool is helping it improve patient outcomes, boost clinician productivity and save more than $1 million annually on transcription costs.
Here’s how it works: The hospital was able to build templates so physicians can capture disease-specific data on patients with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. That information goes to a data warehouse and is subsequently fed to dashboards, which are available to the clinical team. Doctors can access these dashboards prior to the patient’s appointment, enabling better previsit planning.
“Our physicians look at patients who are going to come two weeks from now,” Vaidya said in a recent phone interview. “The team gathers and discusses each patient to make a complete plan.”
The dashboard, he added, gives clinicians a complete snapshot of how the patient is doing.
Additionally, providers can utilize decision support tools within the Quippe tool to help with documentation.
Quippe has been integrated into Phoenix Children’s Allscripts EMR. But providers don’t have to consistently go back and forth between the Quippe and Allscripts systems.
“I think to the users it’s pretty transparent,” Medicomp CEO David Lareau said in a phone interview. “We prefer that our stuff is hidden under the hood.”
The solution is currently live in all of Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s ambulatory clinics, Vaidya noted.
Looking ahead, the hospital plans to expand its use of Quippe. In the short term, it will focus on a few diseases, including asthma and inflammatory bowel disease. Over the next two years, Vaidya said the goal is to pick up about two chronic diseases per division. The hospital has about 25 to 30 different divisions.
