Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals establish rehab documentation system

Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals is marketing an electronic documentation system for post-acute rehabilitation to other rehab hospitals across the nation after co-establishing the system with Allscripts, their core software vendor. The Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals also consist of 2 acute care facilities and ancillary providers serving the Lincoln and Omaha regions of Nebraska.

Chris Lee, vice president of rehabilitation said, “The agency signed with Allscripts in 2008 and knew at the time that it needed to establish the documentation system.”
Roberta Steinhauser, director of hospital applications says, “Since early 2011 year, Madonna with Allscripts have constructed outpatient, respiratory care, skilled nursing, computerized physician order entry, nurse and respiratory charting, case manager, bar code administration, social work and inpatient/outpatient therapy modules, among others.”
Madonna needed to custom-build its apps because frequent times commercial software for rehabilitation facilities do not meet workflows and regulatory requirements of hospitals, and they wind up doing much work-arounds. Steinhauser explains, “We required all clinicians in 1 system. The workflow is extremely streamlined when having physicians only in one system, and that is what we’ve accomplished.”
While an Allscripts platform was used by Madonna to construct the rehab documentation system, all content development has been done in-house. Now, the agency is initiating to market the product, providing demonstrations to other hospitals, setting up a subscription model and is in a business relationship with Allscripts.
In accordance to Lee, the therapy component was the last and greatest piece of the project, taking 2 years to establish. Lee says, “That is because outpatient charting is a part of the component. The interdisciplinary care plan touched every part of the agency.”
The project’ success rested on a vision that Madonna required separate workflows to meet every discipline’s requirements, with clinicians in charge, in accordance to Lee. “We had great collaboration by the information technology department, technical experts and billing, and with front-line clinicians designing it.”
Lee cautions, “Other rehabilitation hospitals mulling the change to electronic documentation must comprehend the significance of the initiative. Do not consider you can take your paper systems and transfer it over. Leverage the strength of your vendor’s modules.”
For example, those modules have enabled Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital to gather functional independence measures at a largely accurate level, in contrast with previous measure gathering that had a high error rate because the measures weren’t done in a uniform manner, Lee points out.