Taking Charge of Your Emergency Department

​In most hospitals, the emergency department (ED) is the first stop for patients seeking care. But as volumes of patients and associated costs continue to rise, EDs are grappling with the same goals:

• Reduce patient wait times
• Provide quality care quickly
• Make communication more efficient
• Achieve favorable patient outcomes
• Streamline billing

There are plenty of electronic health record (EHR) solutions on the market that promise to help hospital staff make these goals a reality. While most of these tools can help in some ways, they don't quite solve all the problems unique to your organization.

Between 2010 and 2013, health systems jumped at the chance to incorporate EHR solutions in order to gain eligibility to Meaningful Use incentives. A Black Book Research survey of 738 emergency department administrative and nursing managers found that 89 percent of ED leaders believe their hospital rushed to incorporate EHR and ED systems. This has resulted in lower productivity, connectivity problems, and greater liability because many enterprise EDIS solutions are generic and the customization process is very difficult.

Tapping into 20 years of experience providing solutions to health systems, MEDHOST called on physicians and nurses to design an EDIS that's intuitive and straightforward. Currently, about 500 emergency departments use our EDIS to help maximize patient flow and operational efficiency in the busiest area of their hospital.

Apart from the crowd

MEDHOST's Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) enhances patient care and safety, communication processes, charting, billing and more--all while helping hospitals meet Meaningful Use criteria. There are plenty of EHR tools on the market--and many of them have a lot of great stuff to offer but MEDHOST has incorporated a few key features that put our EDIS above the rest:

• Customize the EDIS for your organization's needs with ToolKit, an administration utility
• ED-level billing that can reduce errors and improve efficiency
• Set goal thresholds (for example, if you set a maximum patient wait time and a patient exceeds that threshold, your nursing staff will get a notification
• Customize alerts so you're seeing the right information at the right time--and not getting distracted by notifications that aren't important to you

Most importantly, MEDHOST's EDIS is intuitive and easy for clinicians to use. That can make a lot of difference when it comes to training staff to use a new system in the middle of a shift in the hospital's busiest department

This EDIS is based on a touch-screen design. Especially, we've eliminated distracting features that make using new software difficult on clinicians. Our EDIS doesn't have drop-down menus, excess screens, confusing dialogue boxes or other issues that distract you from the important work--providing the best possible care for your patients. This software will help you interact with other staff, capture important patient data, and optimize your processes. You can begin care at a patient's bedside with our one-touch order entry, and patient safety is enhanced with features designed to provide allergy and interaction alerts, the elimination of transcription errors and real-time notification of abnormal lab values.

If you're ready to meet Meaningful Use criteria and potentially save your ED substantial capital, contact us for more information.