St. Joseph Medical Center Implements Krames On-Demandtm Patient Education System

Yardley, PA - When St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland was looking for a new patient education solution, they turned to Krames. "Historically, we created our own patient education handouts," explained Marci Langbaum, Informatics Nurse Specialist at St. Joseph Medical Center. "But we were having trouble finding the time to keep our materials updated. We were looking for a source that could provide quality, current patient education across all our specialty areas and across the continuum of care throughout a patient's stay to discharge. Krames was the perfect solution."

Krames, widely respected as the gold standard in patient education, was able to provide an enterprise wide solution that could meet the diverse needs of St. Joseph's patients. According to Jean Neiner, Krames Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, "an important requirement for St. Joseph was that the material be geared to the patient level. This is Krames' strength – creating education in accordance to health literacy design principles to speed and enhance patient comprehension in support of better outcomes. This is the lynchpin of Krames reputation in the market. Our challenge with St. Joseph was to provide the right education solution designed to meet all their needs."

The answer for St. Joseph was Krames On-Demand, an enterprise wide print-on-demand patient education solution. KOD allows nurses, doctors and educators to instantly select and personalize from over 9,000 single topic HealthSheets for each patient and print them at the point of care. "Krames On-Demand met our key needs," explained Ms. Langbaum. "First off, with the capability to integrate with our Meditech EMR (electronic medical record), we were able to provide our staff with an easy way to document patient education encounters which supports our continuity of care initiatives, quality audits, and JCAHO requirements. Second, KOD includes the ability to edit and add content into the education database. This allows us to integrate much of the education we have created as well edit Krames materials to match our protocols. Finally, being close to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., we see a diverse population. The multi-language capabilities of KOD help our staff reach a wide swath of the population."

To meet the documentation requirements, Krames has built interfaces that will allow for automatic importing of patient information as well as posting the patient education transaction history back to the medical record. "Integrating KOD with the electronic medical record is important to our clients so they can efficiently document patient education activities as well as support patient safety initiatives and workflow requirements, "added Stephanie Manning, Krames Vice President of Electronic Publishing. "Meditech is one of many health information systems that we have been able to successfully integrate with Krames On-Demand."

The integration project and rollout of Krames On-Demand to all users at St. Joseph Medical Center is slated to be completed by the end of this quarter.

SOURCE: St. Joseph Medical Center