Case Studies

University of South Alabama
A hospital system consisting of University of South Alabama Medical Center, USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital, and USA Knollwood Acute and Long Term Care Hospitals
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About the client
The University of South Alabama Medical Center is a regional referral center for south Alabama, southern Mississippi and the panhandle of Florida. As the primary teaching facility for the University of South Alabama College of Medicine, this acute care hospital offers many unique programs and services for adult patients.

The University of South Alabama Children's and Women's Hospital is one of six freestanding hospitals in the nation providing care to children, women and infants. It serves a large region, which extends from eastern Louisiana, through the state of Mississippi, to northern Alabama, to northwest Florida. The hospital provides services to meet the needs of women during all the stages of pregnancy, throughout labor and delivery, and for gynecological needs. Infant services include a Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and a Newborn nursery. Pediatric services include a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, an Infant Toddler Preschool Unit and a School-age, Adolescent Unit. Emergency services are available to evaluate and treat pediatric patients and to triage obstetrical patients to the Labor and Delivery Suite. Surgical services are available for this population of women, children and infants.

The University of South Alabama Knollwood Hospitals include an acute care facility offering medical and surgical services, as well as a long term care hospital.

About the project
This project provided Stoltenberg with the opportunity to show the industry what makes us different. The scope of the project was to implement OAS Gold Clinician View and re-express pathways, using Net Access front-end interoperability to USA’s HIS. Originally, the time line was set to go live with a pilot within six months. As aggressive a time line as that was, because of the expertise of Stoltenberg’s resources, the pilot actually went live in four months across four hospitals – the Medical Center, Children’s and Women’s, and Knollwood acute and long term care facilities.

This accomplishment was a first for the industry.

Due to the size of USA’s support staff, a major concern was to stay as close to Model as possible. This would allow the staff to maintain the pathways after the project was completed. Stoltenberg paid close attention to their maintenance concern and alleviated it by ensuring that our building process deviated only when necessary to meet their needs. When deviations were necessary, Stoltenberg built them in a way that simplified maintenance.

Assessment of Clinical System
Stoltenberg Consulting was part of a three-member assessment team tasked with analyzing University of South Alabama’s (USA) entire Hospital Information System (HIS) to determine the steps needed to install and implement Siemens OAS Gold Re-Expressed and Clinician View.

During this assessment, many areas and processes were identified for improvement and steps required to implement those changes were conveyed to the HIS staff. The Nursing and Pharmacy areas in the four hospitals were examined and steps were identified to ensure preparation for Nursing Advanced Clinical, Medication Charting and Physician Order Entry.

Adhering to Stoltenberg Consulting’s unbendable standards for quality and integrity, we went beyond the scope of the assessment to provide USA with a tool that could be used to create a consolidated project list for HIS. This long-term consolidated project list allowed the CIO and director to set their departments’ priorities, focus their resources, and start the long-term journey to revamping their entire HIS including ancillaries, emergency room, outpatient areas, and inpatient areas.

Implementation of Clinician View through Net Access
Stoltenberg Consulting managed this project as well as provided the majority of the implementation staff to complete the project across the enterprise.

Not only was this a clinical implementation but also Siemens Gold Re-Expressed forms were built. We prepared the project plan based on the hospitals’ requirements and completed this project in half the time our competitors had quoted. Our team re-expressed their nursing and ancillary clinical pathways including, but not limited to, Order Entry, Patient Factors, Allergies, Discharge and Transfers, Department Worklists, and Billing functions.

During the assessment, we had suggested that USA consider using Net Access as the front end of their HIS. This would give all clinicians a single point of entry. All results and census were displayed using Net Access’ Views. Interoperability was used to launch Siemens Gold Re-Expressed and access their clinical pathways. All documentation and order entry was performed in the system. Since USA was not ready to implement Physician Order Entry (POE) but it was included in the consolidated project list, our pathways were built to allow easy expansion to Physician Order Entry.

This project was completed on time and on budget. We are continuing to work with USA as they prepare to move forward with Physician Order Entry.

Client’s comments about Stoltenberg Consulting
“Stoltenberg Consulting prepared such a thorough assessment of what the OAS Gold project would entail prior to the start of the project that I felt comfortable that they would meet USA’s objectives. On-site coding and support through the entire project kept my programming staff up to date with the work being done as it was done. Stoltenberg’s presence at weekly status meetings with the hospital implementation team (consisting of both nursing and HIS representatives) in a training room environment kept the hospital team constantly involved with testing and analysis and their questions were answered. This led to a timely implementation with no surprises along the way. Stoltenberg did a nice job of documenting all modifications to the system. I look forward to working with Stoltenberg Consulting in the future as new projects are implemented for the USA hospitals.”
      Susan Ankersen
      Director, Information Systems

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