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Walk into any exam room in the medical center's 140-acre (57 hectare) campus east of downtown Cleveland, and you'll find a computer terminal on a small rolling cart that physicians and nurses use to document every step of patient care in an electronic chart. Instead of scribbling notes by hand on a metal-clad clipboard, doctors and nurses use the fill-in forms on the monitor to type in each patient's symptoms and vital signs, progress and prognosis, and medications prescribed and taken...
...electronic health record (EHR) might seem like an obvious step. But it is, in fact, a revolution. American physicians have been notoriously slow to adopt digital record-keeping--only 14% of U.S. medical practices keep electronic records, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. When Harris began Cleveland Clinic's technology push in 1999, the hospital's 1,800 M.D.s were equally resistant to change, he says. "We had to prove that this effort was going to make their job easier, not harder...
Luckily, Harris' IT team was able to solve one problem for doctors and nurses right away with the digital chart. Hospital policy mandates that every time a Cleveland Clinic patient sees a doctor in any of 37 buildings on the main campus or dozens of satellite locations in Florida, Abu Dhabi and southeastern Ohio, that doctor will be holding his or her medical chart. With paper records, physicians didn't have those records 20% of the time. As soon as charts were digitized, EHRs were at their fingertips. "No more repeat tests, no more taking extensive histories," says Gene Lazuta...
Harris, a practicing general internist and a Wharton M.B.A., has used his clinical experience to foster innovation that directly benefits patients. The hospital's 3 million--plus patients can schedule appointments online, for example, and fill out paperwork on the Web before they get to the waiting room. Cleveland Clinic's specialists supply second opinions to patients worldwide who enter symptoms into an Internet form and then send test results to doctors via FedEx. Cardiologists silently, invisibly monitor patients' pacemakers and other implanted devices remotely to make sure they're functioning correctly. Soon robotic carts will transport supplies and sanitary...
Harris put together a diverse collection of health-care providers and computer scientists to create Cleveland Clinic's flagship online product, MyChart. Launched in 2005 on the clinic's website, MyChart allows patients to access their EHRs and find up-to-date medical research on their ailments. Doctors must log all examinations, lab results, prescriptions and diagnoses for patients to review. Mary Adams, who lives in a western suburb of Cleveland, is one patient who has come to rely on MyChart. "I can log on, it reminds me I need a tetanus booster, and I schedule it," she says...