Northside Hospital Streamlines Patient Record-Keeping

with McKesson Anesthesia Care™

New solution helps anesthesiologists to keep fully-integrated, real-time patient records.

ATLANTA, December 15, 20XX – Northside Hospital has adopted McKesson Anesthesia Care™ as its primary information management system for anesthesia care and analysis. Northside plans to use McKesson Anesthesia Care heavily in all of its fourteen labor and delivery departments, at each of its three Atlanta-area locations. 44 anesthesiologists employed at Northside Anesthesiology Consulting will be using the software by the end of 20XX. As such, this represents McKesson's largest anesthesia electronic medical record (EMR) software deal to date.

As Northside is the largest labor and delivery hospital in the U.S.A., assisting in over 18,000 deliveries per year, their adoption of McKesson Anesthesia Care is a major step towards the widespread adoption of electronic medical records solutions among anesthesia physicians. Until now, record-keeping in anesthesia care delivery has been mostly paper-based, and driven by manual data entry. Currently, only 20% of all anesthesia departments in the U.S.A. use automated information management software for maintaining and updating medical records.

"McKesson Anesthesia Care allows our anesthesiologists to access, document and evaluate patient data in real time," says Doug Smith, MD, Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Northside. "The physician uses touch-screen charts, bar-code scanning, and electronic note templates to document anesthetic procedures (including Pre-Anesthesia Evaluation), medication use and dosages, and patient data. This allows us to streamline EMR data collection, and eliminate the errors, hassles and uncertainties we get with manual record-keeping. Our physicians can concentrate less on recording and updating data, and more on providing care to the patient."

Northside has previously deployed McKesson's Horizon solution platform across its hospital network. McKesson Anesthesia Care fully integrates with Horizon Surgical Manager™ and Horizon Performance Manager™, and also with Horizon Lab™ and Pathways Healthcare Scheduling™. (Northside has also purchased McKesson Analytics (Financial and Clinicals)™.)

"By integrating with our other Horizon assets, McKesson Anesthesia Care lets us share real-time patient data across departments [i.e. with lab, pharmacy, etc], and across our three hospital locations," says Dr. Smith. "All our physicians and caregivers can access and review patient data regarding anesthesia treatments and medications received. This integration helps us to provide seamless care across the patient treatment cycle, in all phases of care. It also helps to eliminate unnecessary procedures and safeguard against medical errors during patient handoffs."

"The McKesson Anesthesia Care platform is flexible enough that we can adapt it to specialty-care settings. Our physicians can adapt the data management tools to document and record data as they see fit. Also, McKesson Anesthesia Care has a set of analytics tools that helps Northside's anesthesiologists to analyze patient care data and keep in compliance with PQRI and SCIP requirements."

McKesson Anesthesia Care is an FDA 510(k)-approved Class II Medical Device. In addition to PRQI and SCIP, the platform's robust analytics program helps to ensure compliance with AQI, JCAHO, ARRA, and WHO quality and patient safety standards. McKesson Anesthesia Care is the first and only platform to employ SNOMED-CT terminology to ensure that patient care records can be easily transferred and integrated across different healthcare organizations. In addition, McKesson Anesthesia Care features professional charge capture coding to enable the capture and processing of all appropriate professional fees.

"McKesson Anesthesia Care is an important addition to our Better Health 2020™ commitment to helping our customers maximize the value of technology," says Chris Bauleke, president, Health Systems Performance Management, McKesson Provider Technologies. "This technology will help Northside Hospital to reduce costs and achieve a positive ROI by streamlining the patient record-keeping process. It will also help Northside's anesthesiologists to provide better care to patients by ensuring that patient records are continuously up-to-date and available to all caregivers who need them."

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