Mercy, the St. Louis-based Catholic health system with 43 hospitals and 700-plus physician practices across Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, has won a 2016 HIMSS Davies Enterprise Award.
HIMSS is recognizing Mercy for its EHR optimization, process improvement efforts, use of evidence-based protocols and analytics gains – all of which have helped the health system lower costs, improve care quality and patient outcomes and increase reimbursements. They're descibed in a series of case studies on the HIMSS website.
With an aim toward improving care coordination and reducing overtreatment, Mercy configured evidence-based protocols within its EHR system that enabled it to tackle an array of tricky challenges.
For one, recognizing that it wasn't achieving optimal treatment for Medicare and Medicaid patients with heart failure, Mercy sought to improve quality through standardization for selected patient populations. Heart failure mortality rates for patients was at the national average of 6 percent prior to implementation of the new pathway, which achieved reductions in that rate.
Pneumonia mortality was also at the national rate 4 to 5 percent, but an an itiative to expedite the delivery of antibiotics via new pathway order set reduced the time it took for the drugs to be administered by approximately three hours.
Mercy also enacted a clinical documentation improvement project that found, upon closer review of patient records, many areas that could be addressed by better charting. It rolled out a tool that provides more accurate and timely documentation, standardizes workflows with best practices, and gives actionable data to enhance communication with physicians. The MDS Operational Analytic Tool and the Secondary Diagnosis Report provides MDS users a standardized workflow process across the organization.
In another initiative, Mercy's perioperative leaders looked for new ways to monitor, measure and improve the hospitals' surgical procedures while also increasing patient satisfaction. It implemented a dashboard whose analytics data have helped save 2,300 man-hours a month for each of its locations and helped the health system achieve a total savings of $9.42 million across its perioperative departments.
Mercy will be honored with the award during a ceremony at the HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Florida.
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.