What‘s So Wild About I/S?

Their Wild Ideas Team’s brain power takes innovation to new heights

Imagine a shirt that monitors a patient’s vital signs without wires, or a device that turns your desk into a computer keyboard. Sound impossible? Not for the Wild Ideas Team.

The group of 30 information services colleagues uses its collective brain power and creativity to discover new innovations in health care technology. “Our ideas are inspired by everything from hallway conversations and television shows to meetings with different hospital departments,” says Sandra Haldeman, director of clinical applications. “No idea is a bad one.”

Some ideas—like the wireless shirt and virtual keyboard—are tests for potential future use, but countless other bright ideas and smart solutions are already in action. That’s why our I/S team won a national innovator award, earned a cover story in Most Wired Magazine and is among the top 0.5 percent in health care technology nationwide. As the hospital’s reputation grows, so too does the Wild Ideas Team’s profile—nearly half of our I/S colleagues are on a waiting list to join the team.

Here are some of the “wild ideas” currently in use, and the I/S colleagues who helped make them a reality:

Perfect Match
We already use bar codes for medication safety, but do they have other uses? The Wild Ideas Team found one: matching newborn babies to their mother’s breast milk. Previously stored in a freezer and labeled, the milk is now bar-coded to ensure the right match. To make it happen, analyst and programmer Traci Caprio and her team found the right software. “It needed to work seamlessly with our existing systems like computer-assisted physician order entry (CAPOE) and Last Word,” she says. The solution is easy to use. “It gives a green light if you scan the right breast milk and a red light if you don’t,” Caprio says. This eliminates any potential mistakes.

Customizing CAPOE
Physicians order medications with handheld computers through CAPOE, eliminating handwriting errors and increasing patient safety. But what about complex medications like nutrition mixes for people with feeding tubes or chemotherapy mixes for people with cancer? “They didn’t work at first with CAPOE because each mix was very complex, and there weren’t any software solutions that could help,” says applications manager David Pucklavage. The answer: a hospital-made Web-based program that does the calculations behind the scenes. “Physicians enter the order through the Web, which does the calculations and sends it to the pharmacy.”

Make It Happen
When the Wild Ideas Team began developing our advanced intensive care unit, they turned to the brains behind the technology—I/S customer service managers, technical specialists and analysts. “We knew we’d have eight monitors displaying eight different pieces of information,” says Joe Casso (right), who helped on the project. “But we needed to find a way to make all the monitors and all bedside and computer systems work together.” They researched what other hospitals were doing and found a unique solution. All eight monitors are run by a single hard drive—but it’s far different than the one inside your standard PC. “It includes one video card with eight ports that operate at once,” Casso says. The result: convenience (just one button turns on the computer and all eight monitors), flawless picture quality and higher-quality intensive care.

As Seen on TV
When chief information officer Harry Lukens saw veterinarians on a television show using handheld ultrasound devices, he brought the idea to the Wild Ideas Team. To learn more about the device, analyst Carolyn Suess plugged one into her computer, and five minutes later was viewing arteries inside her neck. “We thought it would be perfect for radiology, but its sound waves weren’t powerful enough to penetrate more than a few millimeters,” Suess says. After a little more research, she and her team found the right fit—the medical-surgical intensive care unit (MICU/SICU), which uses the devices for central line placement. “Now patients don’t need to go outside MICU/SICU to have this done,” she says.

ARTICLE TOOLS: