Deep dive: Holy Name Medical Center builds its own EHR

A nurse IT expert at the organization explores the complex journey to an electronic health record unlike any other.

The 360-bed Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey, has always been keen on using technology to enable its mission of providing compassionate and personalized care to a diverse population of patients. "Holy Name believes in a healthy mixture of build and buy, but we did not have faith that any of the 'big box' EHRs would be able to address our need for a truly person-centric approach with technology-enabled workflows," said Jessica Cox, RN, director of product solutions at Holy Name Medical Center. Many of the off-the-shelf systems claim to be interoperable – and they are – but they do not address the needs of an enterprise with multiple physician practices, health centers and hospitals in the network, she contended. So staff knew they needed to integrate Quippe to help make the in-house EHR a clinically intelligent and usable product for physicians and nurses, she said. A huge part of that implementation is the registration of patients coming into the ER – to get all the person data in Harmony EHR in perfect sync with the 30-year-old legacy system, which had previously maintained all the integration with external systems. "As far as who will use the system, initially the registrars, as new patients enter the ER, and all of our ER clinicians – physicians, PAs, nurses, medical assistants, technologists – you name it," Cox explained. Ultimately, anyone who registers a patient throughout the health system will enter into that single patient record, and anyone who deals with the care, coding, billing and patient record-keeping – nurses, physicians, coders, medical records – they'll all use it, just like any EHR."