Oswego Hospital Goes Live With Web-Based Clinical Suite From IntraNexus

Community Hospital is an Early Adopter for Highly Versatile Sapphire

Virginia Beach, VA - IntraNexus Inc., an innovator in healthcare information systems, announced that Oswego Hospital in Oswego, NY, has successfully launched Sapphire, their Web-based, comprehensive healthcare information system. Sapphire provides clinicians with an all-inclusive electronic medical record (EMR), including CPOE, results reporting, and a clinical data repository. Sapphire also enables clinicians to remotely access secure, any-time/anywhere patient information using any device with Web access. Built-in bar-coding capability supports automated medication administration, patient identification, and other patient-safety functions.

As the primary medical facility in the Oswego, NY, region, Oswego Hospital serves more than 5,000 inpatients and 256,000 outpatients a year and needed a more efficient way to handle clinical orders, including automating clinical documentation and physician order entry. The hospital also wanted the new system to tie into their existing ALLEGRA(R) platform and link with applications used by other divisions of its umbrella organization, Oswego Health. After careful review of several healthcare IT vendors, Oswego Hospital selected the browser-based IntraNexus Sapphire healthcare information system as the one best serving their community-hospital needs.

A key factor in Oswego Hospital becoming an early adopter for Sapphire was the system's flexibility and open platform. Craig Dumas, I.S. director stated, "I was particularly interested in the open platform design of the Sapphire architecture. Being browser based means it will run on a variety of hardware solutions."

Gail Greenwood, RN, Oswego Hospital's Chief Operating Officer, explained, "Because Sapphire can run on any hardware -- both in the backend and on devices clinicians will use, our staff is really excited about using portable devices at the bedside for documentation. When IntraNexus showcased all the various devices like laptops, tablets and PDAs, everyone became a lot more enthusiastic about documentation. Bedside documentation becomes a lot more appealing when you can use portable devices.

"Sapphire was the best Go Live we've ever had and was the result of careful planning and work completed by both hospital and IntraNexus staff," she said. "Sapphire was an extremely flexible fit for our hospital's workflow. Flexibility is key. That was Sapphire's biggest selling point, and IntraNexus worked so well as a technology partner that it was difficult to tell the difference between our staff and theirs," said Greenwood.

Another important feature, she noted, was the fact that Oswego Health could easily extend Sapphire to its nursing home facility. "We wanted to bring in a system that would also support our nursing home. There are no solutions out there that do both well, so that made Sapphire even that much more attractive." Sapphire's unique design allows the client to easily tailor the system to fit the organization's unique needs and workflows.

J. Richard O'Pry, President and CEO of IntraNexus, said, "Oswego Hospital shows that a community hospital can become a leader in clinical IT by leveraging a solution that is easy to implement and use while meeting the sophisticated demands of clinical workflows across a wide variety of settings."

Phase 2 of the Sapphire implementation this fall will add functions for clinical documentation, charting, flow sheets, and clinical graphing. Sapphire also features care follow-up alerts and conflict management, automatically alerting the clinician to potential drug allergies and adverse reactions when medication orders are entered. In 2007, IntraNexus will offer the option to upgrade their present ALLEGRA system to Sapphire Financials and Patient Registration, which includes functions for patient self-registration and scheduling, insurance-card scanning, eligibility verification, patient accounting, medical necessity verification, insurance contract management and line-item billing.

SOURCE: IntraNexus, Inc.