Members of the hospital’s Community Advisory Council were told at their annual meeting that the hospital successfully met its biggest challenge in 60 years: the implementation of electronic health records system.
“We went from stone tablets to state-of-the-art,” joked Waldo County Healthcare board president Lee Woodward, before crediting the six members of the administrative team with leading the effort.
Chief Operating Officer Dan Bennett and Chief of Quality Rob Fowler relayed to the group the preparation required before the go-live for the electronic health records, the success of the implementation and the challenges that lie ahead, especially a major upgrade in June 2015.
The bigger challenge for the upcoming year is going to be finding more ways to work with Pen Bay Healthcare. Woodward said, “We have been as financially successful as any hospital in Maine but if you are standing still, you are falling behind.”
As co-chair of the collaboration committee, Woodward said the work is going to be “challenging and exciting” and his guiding principle is going to be what is best for the health of Waldo County residents.
Andrea Patstone, Senior Vice President for System Development at MaineHealth, said healthcare is changing and it’s getting
harder and harder to preserve access to high quality care.
She said while the Collaboration Committee is “probably not looking at a full merger,” there are likely ways to combine administrative and clinical services, and board governance.
“Price and cost of care really does matter,” she said, “and we need the population to make specialty care sustainable.”
Mark Biscone, President and Chief Executive Officer for both hospitals, said that in addition to the 18 areas where we are already sharing services (see Collaboration Committee story), they are working to add more collaborative services over the next several months. “It’s very good and long overdue,” he said.
“We need to be willing to take risks and be creative,” Patstone concluded.