New Hanover Regional Medical Center will transition to electronic medical records by 2012, but preparations to go paperless are already well under way.

The hospital system’s Board of Trustees entered into an agreement last week with the Wisconsin company Epic, a maker of software for large medical groups, hospitals and integrated healthcare organizations.

What will the new system do in terms of record-keeping at New Hanover Regional Medical Center?

“Everything,” said Dr. Thaddeus L. Dunn, hospital chief medical information officer and Epic liaison.

“This will be the most advanced system locally.”

The $56 million system will “be turned on for use” throughout the medical center on July 1, 2012, Dunn said. About $13.7 million will return to the hospital system in defrayed expenses through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

Paper records will eventually disappear from hospital system facilities.

“The goal would be for you to walk into medical records and not see a single chart,” Dunn said. “The hardest thing for me is to give up post-it notes,” he joked.

More than 90 hospital employees will train on the new application at Epic headquarters near Madison, Wis. The first group travels there in February.

“Epic is a unique product. It is quite intuitive. It’s very much like an Apple product,” Dunn said. “Epic grew from a single database function so all of their components were designed to work with their other components.”

The system includes a feature called “clinical physician support” which reminds doctors, nurses and pharmacists of patient allergies or other medical conditions. Dunn cited the example of someone allergic to penicillin.

“We can use the system to provide an additional layer of protection around the patient,” he said.

Epic is the best electronics record keeping system available, Dunn added. He said the current system used by NHRMC is “somewhat rudimentary.”

Epic will enable New Hanover Regional Medical Center to meet more stringent federal standards for integrated record-keeping, Dunn said.

“It’s not enough to simply have a medical record. You must show you can use it in a meaningful way to improve patient care and patient outcomes,” Dunn said.

Dunn and other hospital officials recently traveled to a hospital in Virginia Beach, Va., to see the Epic system in action. Of the roughly 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., less than 2 percent meet industry “meaningful use” criteria.

“It was amazing for us. Physicians work with a medical records system with smiles on their faces,” Dunn said of the transition period to the Epic system.

Training will be important.

“There is a learning curve. While we will go to great lengths to minimize the change, there is no question it will be disruptive,” Dunn said.

New Hanover Regional Medical Center employees who will train in Wisconsin work in the information system and clinical areas.
“It will be a mix of IT people and a mix of operations people,” Dunn said.

The Epic system won’t result in any layoffs.

“No one will lose their job as a result of the electronic medical records system,” Dunn said. “When (employees) finish with training with sophisticated work skills, the whole face of the institution will change.

“There’s no question the skill set required to operate in a highly wired hospital environment will be a different skill set than is currently required,” Dunn said. “Training and transfer of knowledge will be key. We will train – to some degree – everyone in the hospital.”

Other affiliates in the New Hanover Medical Group will gear up for the Epic system in the last quarter of 2011. Pender Memorial Hospital will plug into the system three to six months after that, Dunn said.

Patients will ultimately reap the benefits of the Epic system, he said.

Turnaround times on medical tests, X-rays and other procedures will be shorter. Nurses will be able to administer medicine quicker.

And once an online form containing patient background information is filled out, it will remain in the system, meaning less redundant paperwork.

Patients will also be able to access their medical records through an Epic feature called MyChart. “Patients can schedule appointments, get results and print growth charts,” according to Epic website, http://www.epic.com/

Despite all the efficient features of the computerized system, humans remain a key component of the record-keeping process.

“There’s certain things you have to be careful with, with any computerized system,” Dunn said. “If it is wrong information, it gets propagated. As helpful as it is, it is not a brain. It’s a tool.”