Pa. hospital earns Davies Award
St. Clair Hospital of Mt. Lebanon, Pa., has been named a 2014 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award recipient.
Since 1994, the HIMSS Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence has recognized outstanding achievement of organizations that have utilized health IT to substantially improve patient outcomes while achieving return on investment.
St. Clair Hospital, an independent, 328-bed acute care facility that provides advanced, high quality healthcare to more than 500,000 residents of southwestern Pennsylvania, has realized a range of benefits through the use of IT, while serving a patient population that includes a large ratio of Medicare patients.
One example is improved flow for patient registration in the emergency department, which includes a status board and associated analytics, CPOE, electronic documentation and an electronic bed management system. These changes resulted in a decrease in waiting time from 29 to 4 minutes, a decrease in time to see a physician from 76 to 28 minutes and patient satisfaction going from the 14th to the 99th percentile.
The hospital also has provided pneumonia vaccinations, since December 2012, to nearly 100 percent of at-risk inpatients and avoided an average of 1,100 preventable medication errors per year since 2004 by developing and implementing real-time automated charting for medication administration with dual-scanning technology that included barcoding and RFID. St. Clair has generated incremental net revenue improvements over each prior year, through advancements in recovery of underpayments, increases in collections and reduced denials.
“St. Clair Hospital’s team of clinicians and IT professionals has done a tremendous job of leveraging information technology to integrate efforts to improve quality and the financial bottom line at the same time,” said Jonathan French, director of quality and patient safety, HIMSS North America. “St. Clair has significantly reduced hospital acquired infections and medication errors through the innovative use of IT. As a hospital that serves a large Medicare population, improved clinical outcomes have resulted in revenue capture and costs savings critical for the organization’s financial health.”
St. Clair Hospital will receive its award at the 2015 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Chicago in April.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.