"We needed a totally integrated package...
that would grow with us"

Eight years ago, Jean Meiergerd, director of information systems at St. Francis Memorial in the rural town of West Point, Neb., and hospital administrators came to a tough conclusion: The 25-bed, critical access hospital had outgrown its information service provider.

Jean Meiergerd
Director of Information Systems
St. Francis Memorial
West Point, Nebraska
25-Bed Facility

"Our software wasn't meeting the needs we had at the time," Meiergerd said. The small company that Saint Francis had been using tried to keep customers happy by writing a program for each person who called in with a complaint. "There was not a standard edition of the software, so when we would try to do updates, there were all kinds of problems," Meiergerd said. With software glitches disrupting everything from registration to payroll and Y2K approaching, administrators at the hospital, which operates a main medical clinic, four satellite clinics and an assisted living center, knew a change was needed. "We wanted a totally integrated package, but we also wanted something we could afford," Meiergerd said.

Finding a solution

Enter HMS. Of all the vendors St.Francis and 90 other hospitals across the state considered, it offered the best deal for the most complete package. Administrators also wanted software that provided plenty of clinical and financial applications, and HMS fit the bill. "We knew that was an important piece that we were missing and something that was becoming more important in the future," Meiergerd said. "We wanted to choose software that would grow with us." After going live with HMS, the hospital saw immediate benefits, especially in its more efficient record keeping. "We were able to structure our general ledger, so that we could have individual reports for each of our entities - the hospital, the clinics and the retirement home - but also combine reports for the entire system," Meiergerd said. The hospital gradually added Nursing, Pharmacy, Lab and Radiology applications. Order Entry software eliminated hand written charge slips and made the process more accurate and convenient. "It saved us a lot of manual steps, both in the ordering and in the charging functions," Meiergerd said. Staffers were wary of the technology at first, but eventually came to embrace it. "HMS works with the idea of a "super user" for each department," Meiergerd said. "It was a big plus to use that kind of mentality. It helped the staff to have someone they were already used to working with help them out."

Future plans

Despite the improvements, the hospital still operates on lots of paper. "We're working toward a total electronic record, and HMS is helping us get to that point," Meiergerd said. This fall, the hospital will take the first step toward that goal by adding Clinical View, a solution that provides physicians, nurses and HIM and other caregivers with real-time, Web-based access to their patients' electronic medical records. Meiergerd hopes to eventually implement HMS' eForms and Document Imaging software to eliminate the archaic paper-filing system at St.Francis. She also envisions the installation of high availability technology to allow clinicians around-the-clock access to electronic medical records. She appreciates the responsibility HMS takes for its products, as well as its efforts to improve them. Previous vendors the hospital used blamed each other for software malfunctions. "With HMS, there is no finger pointing and problems get resolved," Meiergerd said.