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July 23, 2009

UPMC wins awards for information systems

For the 11th consecutive year, UPMC has been named one of the 100 Most Wired hospitals and health systems in the United States, according to the 2009 survey by Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, the journal of the American Hospital Association. UPMC is one of only five organizations to appear on the list since its inception.

UPMC began partnering with IBM in 2005 to re-engineer its hardware, software and technology processes to make data sharing and storage simpler, faster and more economical. It also is working on an interoperability initiative with partner dbMotion to create a seamless system of electronic medical records, tying together a patient’s inpatient and outpatient information without replacing existing systems.

The survey covered 1,314 hospitals, or about 21 percent of all U.S. hospitals.

The interoperability team at UPMC has been selected as a recipient of the 2009 Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) awards.

The UPMC team, led by G. Daniel Martich, chief medical information officer, is one of eight winners recognized for applying information systems to the practice of medicine to improve patient care and efficiency.

UPMC has completed the first phase of an interoperability initiative, which went live in February 2008. Working with partners dbMotion and Initiate Systems, UPMC now provides access to integrated medical records from more than 30 clinical systems to some 20,000 UPMC caregivers.

The dbMotion solution and its platform for health interoperability and intelligence enables UPMC to present clinicians with a single, comprehensive view of critical patient data, including allergies, medications, lab results, problems and physician notes, without replacing existing information systems.

The Initiate interoperable health solution includes its enterprise master person index, which ensures that data pulled from disparate systems in both inpatient and outpatient settings are matched to the correct person.

UPMC, which has an investment interest in dbMotion, has demonstrated quality and productivity benefits from the initiative. A study done at one of its 20 hospitals showed an 82 percent reduction in the time spent collecting pre-operative patient information, while improving patient readiness for surgery by 50 percent.

AMDIS represents more than 1,800 physician-leaders responsible for information technology at their institutions.


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