Michael Griffin Discusses Daughters of Charity's Ongoing Technology Initiatives

According to its CEO and president Michael Griffin, Daughters of Charity is undertaking a number of projects that use technology to improve care coordination and communication.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How is Daughters of Charity Services implementing technology to improve care coordination and communication?

One of the other impacts that came out of Hurricane Katrina, we got rid of paper records, and so we’re all digital with our EMR. We have dental services, that’s electronic, our pharmacies are all electronic, optometry services, so we’re a paperless system.

But what we’ve also done with those systems is we’ve integrated. We have a health information exchange that is also a part of the New Orleans region, and we’ve integrated with our hospitals, with the emergency rooms, with some of the urgent cares, so the patient information is more transparent. It’s able to get to the location where the patients are. We have an early alert system with our emergency room, so if one of our patients walks into an emergency room of a hospital we see it real-time on our screen at our health center. All of this is bettering the care quality and real-time access we have for our patients.

We’re also working to get most of our patients on our portal, so we communicate directly with our patients. Our providers are sending health messages and communicating. We haven’t gotten to patients being able to electronically schedule their appointment, but we’re going in that direction.