Glens Falls Hospital is transitioning to a single provider for electronic medical records to streamline data across the health care system, CEO Dianne Shugruesaid.
“When we streamline things, when we implement new medical record processes, when we make it more electronic, the processes will change, which will be better for safety, better for efficiency,” Shugrue said.
The health care system, which is the largest employer in Glens Falls and includes the biggest hospital between Albany and the Canadian border, will move to Cerner as its sole electronic health record system in August 2016.
Managing data about patients is becoming increasingly important in health care, with government incentives and a push toward leveraging information to improve care decisions. Health care systems are increasingly focused on achieving goals in population health, which focuses on the well-being of communities and requires effectively managing and analyzing data.
“Health care is just totally changing,” Shugrue said. “We’re challenged every day to say, what are we doing today that 20 years from now, 30 years now, somebody’s going to say, ‘I can’t believe we did it that way and didn’t hurt anybody along the way’? … And I think some of that is going to have to do with information. That is going to be huge in the health care industry. How do we get information flowing in the right places?”
Shugrue said the health system currently has multiple IT providers for different services, including Cerner for clinical inpatient services, GE Healthcare for patient registration and billing, and Epic for outpatients.
Shugrue said if a patient had a doctor’s visit at the office of an employed Glens Falls Hospital physician and went to the emergency department that night, the ER would not have immediate access to that earlier record because the physician would have used Epic and the ED uses Cerner.
“And that’s within the same system,” she said. “When people are moving within systems, within care, we’re talking about population health management — it’s going to be about information.”
