In Brief:
Huntington Memorial Hospital is a 635-bed, not-for-profit hospital in Pasadena, California, that offers the only emergency department and only center for trauma care in the area. The local physician community was in a state of unrest; some were considering options such as moving their practice elsewhere or retiring rather than dealing with an increasingly complex and burdensome healthcare industry. But the leadership of Huntington had a strong belief that they could lead the way to a more productive and efficient environment for delivery of care. They recognized that the status quo, where physicians and other community-based care providers had no efficient options for accessing hospital-generated patient information or test results, was part of the problem. Providers had to use mail or fax or take the time to physically log in to the hospital’s information system and locate what they needed. All of these options were time-consuming and disruptive to the normal workflow. Huntington had long had a mission embodied in the phrase, “right care, right place, right time.” The way to really accomplish this, the hospital’s leaders believed, was to make all relevant information about a patient available to the provider at the point of care, in a secure and readily accessible environment, regardless of organization, location, technology, device, or care setting.
