February 28, 2018 at 6:11 p.m.
Jay County Hospital will become IU Health Jay @midnight
Integration is going live tonight
Jay County Hospital will become IU Health Jay @midnight
At midnight, Jay County Hospital will be no more.
The long process of forging a future for the facility will come to its turning point as the integration with Indiana University Health goes into effect when Wednesday gives way to Thursday.
Jay County Hospital will cease to exist. IU Health Jay will take its place.
What will that mean for patients who visit the hospital or one of its affiliated doctor’s of offices when they visit Thursday? Right away, not so much.
“Patient care is going to be the same,” said chief nursing officer Lisa Craiger. “It’s going to be by the same people that have always taken care of the patients.”
Most of the initial changes, other than a temporary banner over the main sign in front of the facility and some other cosmetic work, will be behind the scenes.
“It is a change. There’s a lot of little pieces in the background that are going to make for a lot of positives for our patients,” said Jeff Horn, current JCH vice president of support services and soon to be IU Health Jay director of support services. “But as far as a real wow factor … it’s not that way.”
The biggest changes at midnight will involve the systems that doctors, nurses and other hospital employees deal with every day but that the patients may not see directly. There will be new computers, and a new electronic medical records system.
The hospital will be shifting from MEDITECH to Cerner, which is what IU Health uses throughout its system.
All electronic medical records systems record the same information, said Novalea Saligoe and Kathy Silvey of IU Health information services. It’s just the format that changes. The only impact patients should see, they said, is a possible slow-down in the amount of time it takes healthcare providers to enter their information while getting used to the differences.
In an effort to minimize the impact, hospital employees have been going through extensive training ever since the decision to integrate became official Nov. 20 with votes from the hospital board, county council and county commissioners.
The long process of forging a future for the facility will come to its turning point as the integration with Indiana University Health goes into effect when Wednesday gives way to Thursday.
Jay County Hospital will cease to exist. IU Health Jay will take its place.
What will that mean for patients who visit the hospital or one of its affiliated doctor’s of offices when they visit Thursday? Right away, not so much.
“Patient care is going to be the same,” said chief nursing officer Lisa Craiger. “It’s going to be by the same people that have always taken care of the patients.”
Most of the initial changes, other than a temporary banner over the main sign in front of the facility and some other cosmetic work, will be behind the scenes.
“It is a change. There’s a lot of little pieces in the background that are going to make for a lot of positives for our patients,” said Jeff Horn, current JCH vice president of support services and soon to be IU Health Jay director of support services. “But as far as a real wow factor … it’s not that way.”
The biggest changes at midnight will involve the systems that doctors, nurses and other hospital employees deal with every day but that the patients may not see directly. There will be new computers, and a new electronic medical records system.
The hospital will be shifting from MEDITECH to Cerner, which is what IU Health uses throughout its system.
All electronic medical records systems record the same information, said Novalea Saligoe and Kathy Silvey of IU Health information services. It’s just the format that changes. The only impact patients should see, they said, is a possible slow-down in the amount of time it takes healthcare providers to enter their information while getting used to the differences.
In an effort to minimize the impact, hospital employees have been going through extensive training ever since the decision to integrate became official Nov. 20 with votes from the hospital board, county council and county commissioners.
“A lot of training. That’s a big piece of it,” said Horn during a Feb. 15 interview. “And a lot of it now is walking through the process of what’s going to occur on Feb. 28 and March 1, making sure that we do everything we can as we put these systems in place not to interfere with patient care.”
Part of that effort will also include what is being called “elbow-to-elbow support” during the first days of the transition. That means IU Health employees from other facilities, including IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital and IU Health Blackford, will be on hand to guide Jay County Hospital staff through the process. There will also be a “command center” set up to help with troubleshooting.
JCH supervisors have also been making visits to other IU Health facilities in order to get some hands-on experience before tonight’s changes go into effect.
While most of the immediate impact of the integration will occur behind the scenes, there will be some new equipment right away. That will include IV pumps and vital sign monitors, both of which feed information directly to the electronic medical records system rather than requiring staff to enter it manually, and a new anesthesia machine.
The rest of the new equipment will be put into services over the coming weeks and months. The decision to follow that path, rather than trying to implement all of the changes at once, came both for logistical reasons and in an attempt to create a smooth transition.
In the interim, pieces of new equipment are in a “competency room” on the second floor to allow staff time to practice before the equipment is put into place.
“When you start talking about the volume of stuff that’s up there, you can’t bring it all in, get it in, validated, tested, trained and installed in that window, because physically we don’t have the space,” said Horn. “I can’t bring in 35 new beds and put them in the hallway …”
“We’ve got the new equipment in a room so that staff can go in and play with it and work with it and practice,” added Silvey.
Starting Monday, the hospital will have new equipment coming in for several months, with some of the bigger pieces scheduled for the spring break week of March 26 through 30.
The top item on that list is patient beds and other new furniture in patient rooms. There will also be a new nurse call system, scales, MRI, and power stretchers in the emergency room. And there will be new mammography, bone density, diagnostic vascular, portable Xray and fetal monitoring systems.
“Most of the items are going to be in the March/April range,” said Saligoe.
A new phone system is expected to be installed in May or June. And security upgrades are coming as well.
Plans call for an open house sometime this summer, after things have settled down following all of the integration changes.
The process toward the integration began in January 2017 when the hospital board, facing mounting financial losses, voted to work with Quorum Health Resources to plan for its future. (The hospital’s expenses outpaced revenue by nearly $8 million in fiscal year 2017, and the facility has continued to run deficits in the first five months of fiscal 2018.)
With Quorum guiding the process, hospital board members and staff met with a variety of local leaders and community members to discuss priorities for the future. After visits to other hospitals in Indiana to look at potential partnerships, the hospital board in August signed a letter of intent to integrate with IU Health. That led to several months of negotiations over details of the integration before the agreement — it includes a commitment for millions in spending on clinical upgrades and capital improvements — was approved in November.
Part of that effort will also include what is being called “elbow-to-elbow support” during the first days of the transition. That means IU Health employees from other facilities, including IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital and IU Health Blackford, will be on hand to guide Jay County Hospital staff through the process. There will also be a “command center” set up to help with troubleshooting.
JCH supervisors have also been making visits to other IU Health facilities in order to get some hands-on experience before tonight’s changes go into effect.
While most of the immediate impact of the integration will occur behind the scenes, there will be some new equipment right away. That will include IV pumps and vital sign monitors, both of which feed information directly to the electronic medical records system rather than requiring staff to enter it manually, and a new anesthesia machine.
The rest of the new equipment will be put into services over the coming weeks and months. The decision to follow that path, rather than trying to implement all of the changes at once, came both for logistical reasons and in an attempt to create a smooth transition.
In the interim, pieces of new equipment are in a “competency room” on the second floor to allow staff time to practice before the equipment is put into place.
“When you start talking about the volume of stuff that’s up there, you can’t bring it all in, get it in, validated, tested, trained and installed in that window, because physically we don’t have the space,” said Horn. “I can’t bring in 35 new beds and put them in the hallway …”
“We’ve got the new equipment in a room so that staff can go in and play with it and work with it and practice,” added Silvey.
Starting Monday, the hospital will have new equipment coming in for several months, with some of the bigger pieces scheduled for the spring break week of March 26 through 30.
The top item on that list is patient beds and other new furniture in patient rooms. There will also be a new nurse call system, scales, MRI, and power stretchers in the emergency room. And there will be new mammography, bone density, diagnostic vascular, portable Xray and fetal monitoring systems.
“Most of the items are going to be in the March/April range,” said Saligoe.
A new phone system is expected to be installed in May or June. And security upgrades are coming as well.
Plans call for an open house sometime this summer, after things have settled down following all of the integration changes.
The process toward the integration began in January 2017 when the hospital board, facing mounting financial losses, voted to work with Quorum Health Resources to plan for its future. (The hospital’s expenses outpaced revenue by nearly $8 million in fiscal year 2017, and the facility has continued to run deficits in the first five months of fiscal 2018.)
With Quorum guiding the process, hospital board members and staff met with a variety of local leaders and community members to discuss priorities for the future. After visits to other hospitals in Indiana to look at potential partnerships, the hospital board in August signed a letter of intent to integrate with IU Health. That led to several months of negotiations over details of the integration before the agreement — it includes a commitment for millions in spending on clinical upgrades and capital improvements — was approved in November.
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