Children's Hospital

Source: Healthcare Digital

Date :11/04/2008 01:57:07

CEO Gary Perkins and COO Kathy English explain how a fusion of talent and passion has enabled Children’s Hospital in Omaha to become a leader in pediatric care

Written by Emmet Cole and Produced by Alexander Hortaridis

Founded in 1948, Children’s Hospital in Omaha has a team of 1,800 dedicated employees working together to care for patients from age zero to 21 in its 142-bed facility, with expertise in more than 30 pediatric specialties. All of it, says chief operating officer Kathy English, is tied together by one hospital-wide focus. “Everyone who’s here wants to make a difference to the life of a child. That passion is something we all have in common,” she says.

With a dose of kid-focused innovation, continual implementation of new technologies and a top-notch team of healthcare professionals, the hospital is helping pioneer the future of children’s medicine.

Why children?

Children’s is the only hospital in Nebraska focusing solely on the care of children. The hospital’s dedicated focus, CEO Gary Perkins says, provides a distinct level of healthcare to the children of Nebraska and the surrounding region.

“Children are not just small adults,” Perkins says. “Everything we do is geared toward them. A child just doesn’t happen to be the next patient showing up for an X-ray. We focus on pediatric services, and our care model is built around meeting the unique medical, psychological and social needs of both the child and the family.”

Children are less likely to understand the complex nature of an illness or their recovery, so they require a different level of social and psychological care. Further attention must be given to ensure children don’t fall behind in school or in other areas of normal development. And whereas physical therapists could give an adult a simple instruction to lift a hand weight ten times or ride a stationary bike for 30 minutes, children require much more attention and creativity.

“You have to turn it into a game. You have to play or use toys or other kinds of motivation to encourage the child to do the same kind of physical training,” English says.

Full Spectrum of Care for Children

Children’s Hospital is bursting with innovative, kid-specific programs to address these kid-specific needs. For physical therapy, children ride specially designed tricycles around the hallways, closely coached by dedicated therapists. The hospital also has a pet therapy program, where children receive visits from trained and certified therapy dogs and their owners; and a suitcase program, where kids ease their fears by learning about medical equipment hands-on. To help understand the psychology of a child, hospital staff monitor the way each child plays with their toys, a technique that can flag children’s fears and anxieties.

“We also use an art therapist,” English says. “You can tell a lot about how a child is feeling from his or her drawings. With some of our cancer patients for example, the pictures they’d draw after the first treatment were very dark and fearful. Coming out of treatment three or four years later, the pictures were much more brightly colored and lighter in general feel.”

The hospital also places a special emphasis on communication and support with the parents and families of young patients - those who will play the most critical roles in difficult recoveries. “The family is a crucially important support resource for that child,” English says. “It’s as important to help the family to understand the disease or illness and future of this child as it is for the child to understand. If mom and dad have a solid grasp on the situation, they can help the child cope. “

Children’s Hospital has worked hard to perfect its “follow-up” program. Sensing too many irregularities in the use of written evaluations, Children’s decided to switch primarily to phone follow-ups, starting as early as 72 hours from discharge. Focus groups then analyze the data. Some surveys are even recorded in order to give these focus groups what Perkins calls an “actual feeling and experience of the voice of a parent telling us about their experience at Children’s.”

IT Advances

Children’s is also employing new information technologies to further improve its systems. The Eclipsys Sunrise Medication Manager helps enhance patient safety. With the previous system, orders for medications had to be entered twice into the standalone pharmacy and clinical information systems, increasing the possibility of error. The integrated Sunrise Medication Manager and Clinical Manager solutions allow medication orders and clinical decision support alerts to be shared between pharmacists, physicians and nurses.

The goal, hospital CIO Allana Cummings says, is a closed medication loop administration. “That information is available in a single database and gives the same access to all care providers while ensuring that a patient’s medications are administrated appropriately,” she says, noting that the hospital earned Infoworld 100 honors in 2007 for its IT use.

Children’s Hospital has also improved mobility for clinicians through the implementation of tablet technology using portable PCs created by Motion Computing. Pharmacists, for example, would have previously needed to step away from patient rounds in order to check data or enter an order on a fixed computer station. They can now perform the same tasks on the tablet PC. The amount of time the pharmacist is able to stay with the rounding team has increased from 86 to 98 percent as evidenced by a recent time motion study.

Future Challenges

The hospital is in the midst of constructing a new, outpatient Specialty Pediatric Center, which is scheduled to come online in January 2010. Perkins expects it to provide the hospital with an opportunity to examine new processes to best serve patients. With the slumping economy, the hospital expects to see more uninsured families with children still in need of care. New waves of technological advances could test the organization’s value analysis process, and the hospital hopes to implement new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, and better understand the impact of biogenetics on the delivery of care.

With baby boomers aging toward retirement, the hospital also expects to aggressively address challenges of attracting and retaining top-notch healthcare professionals.

Children’s Hospital has a close working relationship with both Creighton University and the University Of Nebraska Medical Center’s College Of Medicine, giving students exceptional hands-on training. Children’s supplies specially trained pediatric nursing instructors. This allows the hospital to tap the best and brightest as interns. Nearly 90 percent of those who work as interns stay on as full-time nursing staff. Once on board, the hospital regularly uses employee engagement surveys, focus groups, and shared governance systems to create an unparalleled combination of talent and passion. “From the very beginning, our culture starts by focusing on kids,” English says.

And it’s that unwavering focus that has Children’s Hospital leading the way in pediatric healthcare.

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