Healthcare Industry’s First Integrated Perinatal System from McKesson Now Live at St. Luke’s Hospital-Allentown Campus

Horizon Perinatal Care integrates fetal strip with mother’s electronic health record to enhance patient safety, reduce duplicate charting and leverage information across the enterprise

ATLANTA, August 2, 2007 –McKesson, the world’s largest healthcare services, automation and information technology company, today announced the successful implementation of its Horizon Perinatal Care™ solution at St. Luke’s Hospital-Allentown, Campus, part of St. Luke’s Hospital & Health Network, in northeastern Pennsylvania. The solution is the first obstetrics (OB)/perinatal information system designed to support continuity of care between the labor and delivery (L&D) department and other hospital departments and units. The system enables interaction with enterprise clinical systems to provide ready access to historical patient information and eliminate redundant charting in support of providing safer, more efficient care to baby and mother.

The integrated solution, now live at St. Luke’s, combines fetal strip archival and surveillance capabilities with components of McKesson’s Horizon Clinicals® suite of solutions that are used in obstetrical care, such as enterprise clinical history and interventions, documentation and bar-code medication administration.

“Most OB systems don’t interact with enterprise clinical systems except to transmit admission, discharge and transfer data,” said Beverly Snyder, associate vice president, Nursing Administration, St. Luke’s Hospital-Allentown Campus. “Obstetrics can no longer operate in such a standalone environment. As the second highest litigated specialty in hospitals today, it’s imperative that obstetrics departments be an integral part of broader patient safety initiatives.”
 
Integrating the mother’s chart with the fetal strip and bar-code administration system improves nursing workflow by eliminating duplicate charting and ensuring that information flows where needed McKesson Announces Horizon Perinatal Care 2/2/2 throughout the hospital. Using Horizon Perinatal Care, St. Luke’s L&D nurses can log on once to administer medications and document care for both mother and baby. For example, if in response to the baby’s heart rate dropping, the nurse turns the mother on her side and administers oxygen, this can be documented once and will populate both the fetal strip and the mother’s record.

McKesson has combined efforts with LMS Medical Systems over the last two years to provide advanced perinatal care and risk reduction tools that promote improved quality, increased patient safety and positive outcomes in obstetrics. LMS is a leader in the medical use of advanced mathematical modeling and neural networks in support of patient safety in perinatal care.

“Injuries to newborns and mothers, although infrequent, are devastating to all involved, hence our focus on providing clinical situational awareness tools to optimize outcomes,” said Dr. Emily Hamilton, vice president of medical research and founder of LMS. “Integrating our OB risk prevention and reduction offerings as well as our surveillance and archival functionality with McKesson’s proven enterprise clinical solutions is an important step forward in an area that is often left out of patient safety initiatives.”

St. Luke’s Hospital & Health Network uses McKesson’s clinical solutions across four campuses for documentation, medication administration, computerized physician order entry, pharmacy, laboratory and emergency care. For the past year, both physicians and nurses at the Allentown Campus have used the Surveillance and Archival component of the Horizon Perinatal Care solution along with the Horizon Expert Documentation™ clinical documentation system. This pairing has given clinicians access to historical patient information (including problems, allergies and medications) across care episodes and settings, which can be especially helpful if the mother has diabetes or another complicating condition. St. Luke’s nurses also use the Horizon Admin-Rx™ bar-code medication administration system to give mothers the same “five rights” safety checks provided on other units: right drug, right patient, right dose, right route and right time.

“The two highest concerns for the OB department are one, ‘How can we reduce risk?’ and two, ‘How can we integrate with enterprise systems?’” said Billie Waldo, M.S., R.N., chief nursing officer of McKesson Provider Technologies. “This solution addresses both issues. For healthcare organizations seeking to provide optimal outcomes for mothers and infants in a high-risk environment, the Horizon Perinatal Care system is the only solution that integrates OB-specific technology needs with the organization’s safety strategy.”

Nursing Solutions that Create More Time to Care

Horizon Perinatal Care is the latest clinical information technology solution from McKesson designed to meet the evolving demands on nurses. Developed by multidisciplinary design teams and McKesson Announces Horizon Perinatal Care 3/3/3 tested externally for usability, McKesson nursing solutions help to manage the complexity of care, enable real-time communication and optimize workflow–ultimately increasing time available for direct patient care. For example, McKesson’s recently announced the HorizonWP® Nursing Portal, which helps nurses access the information they need most, quickly identify trends and focus on what’s most critical, which leads to safer, more efficient care.

About McKesson
McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. McKesson is the longest-operating company in healthcare today, and will mark 175 years of continuous operations in 2008. Over the course of its history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.

About LMS Medical Systems Inc.
LMS, a healthcare information technology company (AMEX LMZ; TSX LMZ), is a leader in the application of advanced mathematical modeling and neural networks for medical use. The LMS CALM™ Suite provides physicians, nursing staff, risk managers and hospital administrators with OB clinical information systems and risk management tools designed to improve outcomes and patient care for mothers and their infants during labor and delivery. For more information: http://www.lmsmedical.com.

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