Saint Vincent Health System Selects TheraDoc to Enhance Infection Control Programs

SALT LAKE CITY -- TheraDoc® , a Salt Lake City-based medical informatics company, has been selected by Saint Vincent Health System, a fully integrated healthcare delivery network, for implementation at Saint Vincent Health Center, a 436-bed, not-for-profit, tertiary-care hospital and regional medical center located in Erie, Pa. Saint Vincent will utilize TheraDocs patented solutions to provide real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support to augment Saint Vincents well-established infection monitoring and control programs.

With the addition of Saint VincentHealthCenter, TheraDoc technology will soon be implemented at 30 Pennsylvania hospitals, including facilities from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, West Penn Allegheny Health System in Pittsburgh and Philadelphias Jefferson Health System.

Saint Vincent Health System, nationally recognized as a health care quality leader by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Joint Commission, and the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), has chosen to implement the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) along with the Infection Control Assistant® (ICA).

TheraDocs ESP technology leverages real-time clinical data from multiple sources within the hospital, including information from ADT, microbiology, lab, pharmacy, radiology, and surgery. The ICA combines a complete workflow tool for infection control practitioners (ICPs) with its continuous surveillance, intelligent alerts and timely analysis of individual infections and outbreaks. This helps ICPs to prevent infections, better manage isolations and precautions, more quickly find and confirm infections, more efficiently conduct MRSA screening protocols, identify trends and initiate interventions. This access to more-timely and better information coupled with knowledge provides automated and enhanced internal and external electronic reporting, and eliminates hours of manual tasks resulting in improved patient safety and quality of care, as well as better financial outcomes.

Over the past 15 years, Saint Vincent Health System has been successful in reducing the number of infectious disease outbreaks using technology developed in-house. In striving to further improve its infection control programs, however, the organization looked to the marketplace for the latest technology.

When we conducted our review, TheraDoc presented the only solution that truly enhanced our current capacity to monitor, manage, prevent and report hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), said Howard Nadworny, MD, a hospital epidemiologist in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Saint Vincent Health System. Their robust, real-time technology and reporting systems will also allow our ICPs to spend less time on surveillance and more time on intervention.

Our infection control nurses at Saint Vincent are constantly inundated with paperwork and truly need ways to streamline processes for effective infection control programs, adds Saint Vincent infection control coordinator Terry Kalgren, RN, BSN, CIC. TheraDoc technology not only significantly reduces this paperwork, it also allows us to customize reports to meet the requirements of PHC4 and the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).

In Pennsylvania, hospitals are required to report all types of HAIs, as well as other related quality-of-care measures, to both NHSN and PHC4. These state mandates also require electronic surveillance systems to be compatible with NHSN, a compliance that TheraDoc meets by incorporating NHSN infection definitions into its system for reporting and identification of infections.

Stan Pestotnik, TheraDoc president and CEO, said, We are privileged to implement our technology to further improve patient safety measures at Saint Vincent Health System. TheraDoc has a non-negotiable adherence to healthcare industry standards and best practice solutions in our effort to improve patient safety and care, along with financial outcomes for healthcare institutions and their patients.

Source: TheraDoc, Inc.