McKnight’s Long-Term Care News honored Life Care Centers of America with a Gold-level Excellence in Technology Award.
The locally based health care company took the Gold Award in the Transitions category for showing how its internally developed electronic health records system makes transitions of care smoother for patients.
“We’re very proud of the accomplishments of our Information Technology department,” said Beecher Hunter, Life Care president. “The creativity, passion and commitment these associates bring to their work enhances the efficiency and the effectiveness of the process of health care for those we serve.
The recognition they have earned in this important Transitions category is an example.”
Much of the growth this year has been with the patient portal component of SofCare2, Life Care’s EHR.
“Patients can create their own username and password, get into the portal and look up several pieces of their clinical information, like their diagnosis codes, medications, allergies and electronic lab results, where available,” explained Joy Abraham, vice president of applications development.
“For all these pieces of information, there’s a lot of educational material that we’ve linked to it as well,” Ms. Abraham added. “We’ve provided patients with the ability to download the information in an electronic format, copy it to a USB drive and take it to their physician. That physician, if they’re using a standard EHR, can import that information directly.”
Making that health information available to health care providers securely without manually entering and re-entering data reduces the chance of errors.
SofCare2 puts the health information into a format that can upload from other health care organizations, such as hospitals, so that Life Care facilities can receive clinical information automatically when a resident admits from the hospital. They can also send information back to participating hospitals in a format they can read if a resident has to return to the hospital.
“The beauty is that our IT department has made it relatively simple to have interconnectivity with other sites,” said Kenneth Scott, D.O., Life Care’s chief medical officer.
Dr. Scott oversees the company’s initiative to place an on-site physician in each building, and each of the current on-physicians is using SofCare2.
“Our IT department is working so well with our doctors,” Dr. Scott said, referring to the fact that the physicians provided direct feedback during the development process. “It’s all about getting a doctor to think like a computer, or a computer to think like a doc.”
“It should come as no surprise that American health care is undergoing dramatic changes with technology at the root,” said Terry Leonard, Life Care’s chief information officer. “I’m extremely proud that Life Care has taken an innovative approach. Within Life Care’s IT department, our passion is providing the technical tools to enable our caregivers to continually improve quality of care.”