What's more, adds Kathleen McLaughlin, N.N.P., an advanced practice nurse at Hutzel Women's Hospital who worked on the project, “That involvement helped very much with bringing out the lessons learned” in the initiative. Those four executives “asked what we had learned during the rollout, and what we could change.” Further, when the other three DMC NICUs rolled out the initiative following Hutzel's go-live, “We built on that, so it was very much a team approach.”

None of this team spirit is accidental, says Natale. “The culture of the DMC really folds over into how we do clinical transformation. The commitment we have is to present to the clinician information that is living, in the EMR, and appears for the clinician at the point of care. It's really all about patient care, patient safety, and ever-increasing excellence.”

In fact, she says, “As we get better and better in terms of using these clinical information systems, we ought to know with increasing certainty that what we produce is what we need to produce. And that's what energizes all of us. We want to be known as the place for patient safety, predictable excellence, and the quality of the practice environment.” Not surprisingly, the DMC folks are using performance improvement methodologies - including Lean management and Six Sigma - to improve care quality, patient safety, and clinician workflow/efficiency.

IT has a critical role to play in all this, says CIO LeRoy. “We're here to facilitate what the clinicians need to do, to advance them to where they need to go. And in order to do that, it requires a three-legged stool of collaboration among physicians, other clinicians, and IT. As it turns out, we in IT are always sitting at the table in important meetings. We want to hear their requirements and help them accomplish what needs to be accomplished.”

Put simply, CEO Malone says, “The reason it works is because the culture here is a team culture and multidisciplinary. And the only reason this works is because of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists all working together. The end point of this project, in particular, was improved patient safety around medication administration. At the end of it, for me, as a neonatologist, there's nothing better than feeling that patients are safer.”

And while it might be easy to talk about team culture and multidisciplinary collaboration, those priorities are having an effect on nurse recruiting at DMC. COO Gibson hosts breakfast every month for nurse new-hires. “When I ask them how things are going, one of the first things they mention is the electronic medical record. A few months ago, I had 25 of them in the room together and, as a group, they basically said, ‘We came to the DMC because you have an EMR. Many hospitals advertise in the newspaper that they're electronic, but they don't even have CPOE.’ Over and over they're telling us in these new-hires breakfasts that our EMR, CPOE, and nursing documentation capabilities are a major reason they're coming to work here.” - M.H.