Project One transition ongoing at Phoebe Putney Health System

ALBANY — Project One, the term used within Phoebe Putney Health System for the onboarding of its mandatory electronic health records system known as Meditech, went live just after 10 a.m. on Oct. 1 after a year-long planning process.

Officials said Wednesday that the launch went as well as could be expected.

“It was very challenging … it was challenging, no doubt about it,” said Jesse Diaz, vice president and chief information officer at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, at the hospital’s monthly board meeting.

Diaz said, in the beginning, there were 1,000 calls a day coming into the 24/7 Meditech command center at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. After that first day, some things were fine-tuned to help smooth out some rough patches.

Some of those rough patches caused friction, but — for the most part — heads remained cool, Diaz said.

“Morale was good for the most part,” he said.

The number of calls have started to diminish. The transition did bring about a few patient safety issues, including those related to dosages or transfer orders, that were quickly be sorted out.

One such incident was a dosage problem that occurred in the neonatal intensive care unit, said Dr. William Sewell, chief medical information officer at Phoebe’s main campus.

“We identified that immediately, and it is fixed now,” Sewell said.

Sewell said that, from Sunday to Wednesday, there had been an increase of 4 percent in the number of computer-generated orders from the 69.3 percent at the time of launch.

This meant, that as of the hospital’s board meeting on Wednesday, nearly three-fourths of the orders at the hospital were being computer-generated. This reflected an increase of 15-20 percent from before Oct. 1, Sewell said.

“There is no reason to think that at the end of the year we won’t be at 90-95 percent,” he said.

Since some things are, for the time being, considered too cumbersome to do electronically — including surgical consent forms — it is unlikely that 100 percent will be met in the near future, Sewell said.

Three-thousand issues were identified in the six days following launch, 87 percent of which had by addressed as of midday Wednesday. There have been 85 physician issues identified, mostly connected to refusal to use the system, Sewell said.

Sewell added that there will be a lot of work needing to be done in the coming months, half of which will be optimizing. Overall, most of the issues have centered on frustration associated with a major change from what many health care providers have become accustomed to.

“It takes more time, and nobody around this table wants that (in their work place),” Sewell said to the board.

Once the adjustment is made, officials said, things should run more efficiently in the long-run. One obvious impact will be the elimination of the need to interpret a doctor’s handwriting, reducing potential patient safety issues that might result.

“(Ultimately), the patients will be the beneficiaries of this,” Dr. Steve Kitchen said, chief medical officer at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital.

The costs associated with Project One and the implementation of a new coding system to report diagnoses and inpatient procedures known as International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, or ICD-10, has influenced officials at Phoebe to open up a $50 million line of credit with SunTrust Bank.

Officials at the hospital said the one-year line of credit, which will start Oct. 15, is meant to provide an additional layer of liquidity if government and commercial payers are unable to process Phoebe’s claims in a timely way due to the ICD-10 code transition. The new system, which includes 70,000 diagnosis codes and 72,000 procedure codes — an increase from 14,600 diagnosis codes and 3,900 procedure codes with the previous version — was required to be activated by Oct. 1.

A resolution presented on Wednesday regarding the line of credit was approved by the board.