Meditech Implementation Begins

Southwest Medical Center signed a contract in June with Medical Information Technology (Meditech) to install a new computerized hospital information system.

The new Meditech system will fully integrate all departments onto a single computer platform so information can be easily shared between departments within the hospital. For the first time, caregivers will have the ability to view all computerized patient information from a single screen.

Conversion to the new system will be done in several phases.
1. The first phase includes the Finance and Human Resources departments. General Accounting and HR/Payroll systems will be live on Meditech on January 1, 2004.
2. The second phase includes Admissions, Patient Accounting, Medical Records, Order Communication, Laboratory, Radiology, Pharmacy, Surgery, and Materials Management. These systems will be live on May 1, 2004.
3. The third phase includes staff scheduling and the executive information system which will go live a few months after phase 2.
4. The fourth phase will be nurse care planning and documentation. No live date has been established yet but it will most likely be in 2005.

Department implementation teams for each system will be established with members from the primary department and from other departments who will be impacted by the change. Meditech implementation specialists will visit Liberal 51 times during the first three phases of the implementation. SWMC employees will travel to Boston 17 times for training on their specific systems.

The Meditech system will run on 16 Dell 2.8Ghz dual Xeon processors using the Windows 2000 operating system. Remote access will be available to physician offices via secure VPN Internet connections through the SWMC firewall.

Watch for updates as progress continues on the implementation.