John Flaherty, 48
Emergency physician
ENH Medical Group,
Glenbrook Hospital, Glenview
A 90-year-old woman was brought into the emergency room of Glenbrook Hospital in Glenview on Thanksgiving night.
But instead of the endless waiting familiar to viewers of TV’s “ER,” she was whisked into bed and had a nurse at her side within 10 minutes.
That efficiency may have saved her life. Glenbrook emergency physician John Flaherty said her blood was “lethally thin” and seconds counted.
A technology called EpicCare, made by Madison, Wis.-based Epic Systems Corp. (www.epic
sys.com) is responsible, in large part, for the dramatically reduced wait times experienced by patients at Glenbrook, where the system has been live for over a year.
“Epic is an electronic medical records system,” said Dr. Flaherty.
“Patients’ complaints are listed, as well as their medications, allergies, and past medical and social histories.”
There are 10 stationary terminals running the Windows 2000-based software in Glenbrook’s emergency room and four mobile units with wireless connections to the server that are wheeled from room to room to take a patient’s information at his or her bedside.
Before Epic, that information gathering was done in the discomfort of the waiting room.
“If somebody is very sick or very old, you don’t make them sit in the waiting room,” said the doctor. “This way, a nurse or a registration clerk sits bedside” and does the paperwork.
And at an emergency room that sees about 90 patients each day, Epic helps tremendously with what Flaherty calls “patient flow.”
“There’s a visual layout [map] of our ER and each room is color coded, based on whether the patient is waiting for a nurse, waiting for lab tests, or waiting for a doctor to see them,” he said.
Nurses no longer have to tell doctors–again and again–that a patient is ready to see them.
“I can be in another room sewing up a patient and a nurse can be in a different room drawing blood,” Flaherty said, “and we can look at the screen and see that two more patients are waiting to be seen.”
Of course, charts and medical histories are called up through the system before beginning work with a new patient.
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But the technically inclined Flaherty (“I was the third cable Internet customer in Buffalo Grove,” he said.) does not limit his technology use to within the hospital.
He often searches through medical literature on the search engines Medline (http://medline.cos.com) and PubMed (www.pubmed.org).
Both tools are open to the public–and helpful for researching any type of medical issue.
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