NEW YORK, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- “Patient safety and risk reduction are among the key issues in healthcare today,” says Maria Smilios Clinical Nurse Manager of Inpatient OB at Flushing Hospital Medical Center (FHMC), part of the MediSys Health Network. “These are complex issues because of the legal, medical liability and financial implications that lie beneath the obvious quality of care concerns. We took an enormous step in addressing these issues in the OB environment when we implemented E&C’s IPROB (Intelligent Patient Record for Obstetrics) several years ago. Now we’ve closed the loop by integrating outpatient visits into the IPROB with the activation of the IPR’s prenatal module.”
E&C Medical Intelligence is the leading provider of risk reduction and clinical quality improvement software and services. IPROB is the industry’s most advanced best practice, real-time clinical and risk management support tool for the OB practitioner. Used in over 75,000 births to date, IPROB has demonstrated statistical reductions in risk and prevention of critical clinical errors in what is traditionally the highest medical liability area in healthcare. With the introduction of the Prenatal Module, outpatient care activities are recorded and can be streamed directly into the hospital’s IPROB patient chart.
Typically, FHMC outpatient and clinic visits have been recorded manually for subsequent entry into the patient’s chart, often taking days to appear. “Now, all orders, notes, reminders, virtually everything that occurs during clinic visits streams right into the IPR chart and is documented and available in the hospital in real-time,” said Wayne R. Cohen, MD, MediSys OB Department Chairman. “So, not only has it markedly simplified and streamlined the whole recordkeeping process but, more importantly, we have up to the minute, reliable information on our OB patients. And you have no idea how valuable this is until a patient arrives in the ER and you can’t get your hands on the record. Everything I need to know, every detail of a patient’s visit to our facilities, is right there for me. That’s real continuity and it ensures that I can give my patients the very best care possible.”
IPROB provides unique, new tools to help eliminate clinical errors in real-time and improve the quality of care in the OB environment. Functioning as a complete intelligent OB chart for both physicians and nurses, the system proactively supports clinicians in providing the highest level of care and avoiding clinical mistakes, while generating meticulous documentation. At its core is a comprehensive clinical knowledgebase comprised of over 6,500 best practice protocols in OB and 13,000 clinical data fields. IPROB’s powerful inference engine analyzes current patient data against this knowledgebase to offer clinicians appropriate choices of care, documentation and risk management pathways for the current specific clinical situation. The complete IPROB package also includes an extensive risk management consultancy to help identify, isolate, and remediate quality deviations from the hospital’s accepted best practices.
“We are always asking ourselves what we can do to reduce risk for our patients and our facility,” said Melanie Sumersille, IPROB Project Manager for MediSys. “Now with the prenatal capability we can say we are able to provide optimal care from the point of entry right through labor and delivery and post-partum.”
About Flushing Hospital Medical Center
Founded in 1884, Flushing Hospital Medical Center (FHMC) is Queens’ first hospital. The hospital today is a 293-bed not-for-profit teaching facility located in the culturally diverse Flushing community. In 2004, FHMC doctors performed approximately 2,100 deliveries. With the addition of eight new Labor Delivery & Recovery suites, Flushing Hospital has displayed its commitment to the community to provide the most positive birthing experience. FHMC is part of the MediSys Health Network, the not-for-profit parent organization of healthcare provider organizations that include Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, and Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center.
About E&C Medical Intelligence
E&C Medical Intelligence, Inc. is a pioneer in automated clinical management support and documentation. The company provides real-time, knowledge-based best practice software systems and associated consulting services along the obstetrics continuum (prenatal, labor and delivery, and postpartum). E&C systems have proven their ability to enhance the quality of care, while reducing risk and medical liability exposure. E&C is based in New York with offices in Chicago, Phoenix, Baltimore, Nashville and Orlando. Visit the E&C website at: http://www.ecmed.com .
Flushing Hospital Medical Center
CONTACT: Gail Brennan of E&C Medical Intelligence, +1-212-686-1530,GailB@ecmed.com
Web site: http://www.ecmed.com/
