DETROIT – Detroit Medical Center executives say they have achieved improved patient safety and saved $5 million to boot, thanks to DMC's system-wide electronic medical system.

It is the second year in a row in which computer-based healthcare information processing created major improvements in quality of care and cost-savings for DMC's eight hospitals, officials said.

The windfall in savings - triggered by highly effective electronic monitoring of critical tasks such as treating pressure ulcers and preventing medication errors - resulted in a healthy return on investment, they said.

The $50 million system powered by Kansas City, Mo-based Cerner Corp, has gone online throughout the DMC in gradual stages over a 12-year period, starting in 1998.

"The latest numbers are in, and we continue to see great strides in improving quality, treating patients more quickly and preventing error, which translates to dollar savings as well," said Chief Nursing Officer Patricia Natale. "This work with these results is very exciting."

"The savings are only part of the story," she added, "because EMR is also a major step forward on the road to better quality of patient care. Thanks to EMR, we're now seeing a dramatic reduction in the length of hospital stays due to pressure sores, along with a dramatic reduction of drug errors through EMR-enabled medication scanning."

"The latest surveys show that EMR has helped to reduce medication errors by up to 75 percent," said DMC Chief Medical Information Officer Leland Babitch, MD. "Obviously, that's a major gain for patients - especially given the fact that medication errors account for the majority of accidental deaths and injuries at U.S. hospitals."

The U.S. Institute of Medicine has estimated that up to 100,000 patients die as a result of hospital errors annually.

Treating pressure ulcers

The impact of the electronic medical record system on the treatment of pressure ulcers was especially noticeable, said DMC quality-of-care administrators. 

They noted that the chronic sores often require extended hospital stays and thus drive up costs. But the most recent DMC Patient Care Services study of severe pressure ulcer cases showed that close EMR monitoring of bedsores reduced the average length of stay required to treat them by nearly three full days last year, compared with the average length of ulcer-triggered stays before EMR monitoring began in 2008.
 
The DMC study concluded that the reduction in the length of pressure ulcer-related hospital stays - in a system that admits more than 75,000 patients each year - was now helping to generate more than $4.5 million in yearly cost savings. 
 
"The data on electronic medical records and patient safety and quality of care are clear and convincing by now," said DMC Vice President for Quality and Safety Michelle Schreiber, MD.  "Those data demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that EMR is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to protecting patients from hospital errors.

"But EMR is also proving to be an effective method for promoting quality of care - and the new numbers on bedsores and length of stays show how computer-based recordkeeping helps caregivers to take better care of patients day in and day out."

In spite of the savings to be had from hospital-based EMR, however, recent studies show that the majority of U.S. hospitals have either failed to implement top-to-bottom EMR systems - or are cutting back on information technology (IT) programs already in place.

As of August 2010, fewer than 4 percent of U.S. hospitals had implemented the level of system-wide electronic patient recordkeeping that is now in place at the DMC.  In addition, a recent study at the University of Michigan School of Medicine showed that more than one-fourth of the nation's recession-affected hospitals have been cutting back on their already existing IT programs. 

The cash-strapped hospitals were slashing IT budgets, reported the study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, in spite of the fact that the Obama administration has recently made available more than $2.73 billion in Medicare/Medicaid bonuses for clinicians and hospitals that spend to improve their electronic medical records systems.

"The DMC has spent $50 million on building a powerful EMR system over the past five or six years, said Michael Duggan, president and CEO of the Detroit Medical Center, "and we did it because we like to think of ourselves as the 'hospital of the future' - as a state-of-the-art healing center where patients know they can get the best healthcare available anywhere today.  "

"At the same time, the ability to greatly reduce healthcare costs via electronic medical records is an added bonus - which makes implementing EMR a win-win situation for everyone involved."