Technology is a “short-term investment for long-term outcomes,” says Kathy Love, CEO of Clark Regional Medical Center, a 79-staffed-bed community hospital in Winchester, KY.
“Hospitals should be looking toward strategic investments to meet their market needs in areas that will ultimately improve outcomes, reduce length of stay, and reduce costs,” Love says. “You’ve got to look across your service lines at what drives cost, patient delivery, bad outcomes, and the ability for the patient to recover faster and better and do everything you can to get there.”
Clark Regional Medical Center has recently invested in advanced laparoscopic equipment, for example, because minimally invasive techniques reduce LOS and recovery time. “We have to be aggressively looking at new surgical techniques and move as fast as we can toward cutting-edge technology that really affects patient outcomes,” Love says. “You can’t be the one that sits back and is the last adopter.”
Radiology is another service line where investment now will pay dividends in the future, in part because of its potential to replace some invasive diagnostic procedures, such as those in the cardio space. Because imaging is noninvasive, it can also cut down on infections and other quality concerns.
When the 25-staffed-bed Elizabethtown (NY) Community Hospital conducted an analysis of its technology infrastructure, the radiology department—with its old, hand-me-down x-ray equipment—quickly emerged as a space with a lot of unrealized potential. It was also a chief source of complaints from physicians who felt imaging tests simply weren’t reliable, says CEO Rod Boula. “That’s lost business,” he says.
“I can remember the days when we didn’t have a fax machine. On the care side you didn’t have CT scanning as part of primary care—that was for the big hospitals. Now we’re seeing it become more of a primary care tool,” Boula says.
Telemedicine is another technology that’s particularly well-suited to smaller organizations. Specialists once traveled to Elizabethtown to see a handful of patients when they could have stayed in their offices and treated dozens instead. “It’s not efficient,” Boula says. “They’re saying, ‘Look, from a business perspective I can’t do this any longer.’ So we lose the service.”
And now tiny Elizabethtown can offer its patients access to specialists across the country or around the world.
Many small hospitals are early adopters of technology such as telemedicine because they are innovative by nature, says Jane Hooper, director of community relations at Elizabethtown. After all, they have to be.
“They’re in a small community; they are miles away from other healthcare organizations; they have patients who need access to specialty physicians; they need access to digital mammograms, for example. And we figure out a way to make it work. We just find a way to make it happen—providing these people with the care they need.”
“It’s not a question of can we do it; it’s question of how,” says Elizabethtown CIO Brett Sicola. “We have to make this happen. You’re going to come up against obstacles. Figure it out, work your way through, come up with a plan. We will get there, step by step.”
One step in the plan for Elizabethtown is to purchase technology with an eye to the future. The organization has more telemedicine units than it can use on a regular basis and it definitely has more fiber-optic connectivity than it needs. For now, at least. An early investment in smart pumps with wireless connectivity is one example. “We couldn’t necessarily take full advantage of that today.
It is used for drug updates to the libraries; it is used to send information to a centralized reporting server—someday, when we’re ready, we’ll integrate with our EMR,” Sicola says. “One step at a time.”
“We want to have as many things in place as we can so that when opportunity presents itself we’re ready,” Hooper says. “We’re getting technology purchased and installed and ready ahead of time so that when things change in the future or we need to add things in the future we’re already ready to go.”
“We have products that will grow with us in the future,” Sicola says. “Part of our strategy has been implementing health information technology that fits our culture, fits our business model, and is compliant with all of the standards,” Sicola says.