Electronic records: Parkland wireless 'second to none'
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In its shift to go paperless, Parkland's new wireless system encompasses 1,200 new computers, 300 printers and 800 wireless antennas, all for a cost of $55 million in private funds. Kowitt said none of the startup costs were deducted from a recently passed $747 million bond election to build a new hospital.
The System plans to apply for some of the near-$20 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds made available to medical facilities that implement wireless technology and make their records available to competitors.
"That money is gonna' come in two ways," Kowitt said.
About $17 billion of the funds will be apportioned to hospitals based on what is now termed "meaningful use" (meaning electronic medical records are in place and are made available to competing institutions), according to Kowitt. The remaining $2 billion will be allocated to systems that are developing regional centers.
"We're looking at potential projects," Kowitt said, referring to the $2 billion that will be allocated to developing regional centers.
Federal incentives for medical facilities with electronic-record capabilities begin in 2011 and last until 2015, Kowitt said. In 2015, Medicare and Medicaid benefits will be reduced to those systems that do not share electronic medical records with competitors.
"The carrot becomes the stick in 2015," Kowitt said.
Going wireless also allows Parkland to accomplish what other hospital systems cannot. For example the hospital's Distributed Antenna System (DAS) can support multiple services per antenna. The antennas currently run data and cell traffic, but in the future will have the capacity to run first-response radio and real-time location services, a system equipped to locate staff and equipment quickly and easily within the reaches of the hospital.
"Our single antennas will support all those services instead of one antenna per service," Kowitt said.
Additionally a recent study led by Amarasingham found Texas hospitals equipped with electronic records and other automated technologies suffered fewer complications and mortality rates. The wireless capacity also proved cost-efficient.
"These improvements will help us better serve our patients," said John Dragovits, Parkland's chief financial officer.
To ready for the new technology, hospital IT specialists and medical personnel completed rigorous testing for a number of weeks. So how did nurses and doctors react to the new technology?
"Amazingly," Kowitt said. "We were a little nervous about it, but were amazed at how quickly they (medical personnel) picked it up...by the time the system came online, they were all up to the challenge."
