Hamot Medical Center, a 343-bed acute care facility, purchased TouchWorks for its fully-owned physician group, the Hamot Primary Care Network. Together, the groups serve more than one million patients in northwestern Pennsylvania, western New York and eastern Ohio.
The TouchWorks electronic health record (EHR) brings Hamot’s physicians access to patient information when and where they need it – in the clinic, at the hospital or while on-call at home. The system speeds and automates clinical tasks such as prescribing and refilling medications, ordering and viewing tests, and documenting care.
TouchWorks features clinical tools that support safe medical practices, including health maintenance alerts, clinical decision support, and automated drug interaction checking.
While the physician network will be the primary users of TouchWorks, Hamot Medical Center emergency department physicians and hospitalists will also have access to the EHR through a secure online hospital portal.
Connectivity offers a number of benefits to patients. On the hospital side, the admitting hospitalist will have access to each patient’s medication history and problems list, said Dr Jim Reichert, physician leader of the clinical information systems department at Hamot Medical Center. And when a primary care physician asks their patient what medication they received during their hospital visit, they won’t have to rely on the patient’s memory – they will have the information right there at their fingertips.
