In this issue, Healthcare Informatics profiles the three winners of our Innovator Awards and examines how each system has nurtured a culture of excellence. This year, the winning hospitals were selected by you, our readers. While there were many groundbreaking projects among the dozens that were submitted, these three were voted the most innovative:
Detroit Medical Center was chosen for its “Neonatal Barcode Scanning” project. Read, “A Model of Innovation,” page 28, to learn about the organization's collaborative effort to implement barcode scanning-based medication administration for infants. Since these neonates can weigh less than 1 pound, standard-sized barcode labels were not a viable option, but an innovative, team effort was able to solve the problem.
In, “The Long Mile,” page 34, we look at how Johns Hopkins Hospital executives got to the root of safety by walking a mile in the clinicians’ shoes. Making sure hospital leaders know what goes on at the front line and helping them understand patient care at the grassroots level were key components to the success of this project, in which senior leaders adopted hospital units.
‘We treat one patient at a time,’ is a philosophy so ingrained at BayCare Health System that staff members ranging from registrars to the CEO cite it again and again. Read “Identify Yourself,” page 42, to learn how palm vein scanning is being used to identify patients, and to understand how BayCare developed a culture that encourages and rewards innovation on a daily basis.
Sidebar
Correction: Reading Hospital CIO Jayashree Raman was misquoted on p. 40 of the March issue. The text of the sidebar refers to CareFocus; but Reading Hospital is solely a customer of Siemens Healthcare in the case management IS space.
Healthcare Informatics 2009 April;26(4):10
