An integrated hospital for the digital age

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By Jennifer Couzin

(IDG) -- HealthSouth, a Birmingham, Ala.-based company that runs rehabilitation centers and hospitals across the country, announced Monday that it will build a digitally integrated hospital using technology designed by Oracle -- a hospital for the third millennium.

Twelve stories tall with three "rapid transport" elevators, the facility will include centralized electronic storage for medical records, screens by patients' beds that physicians can use to access the Internet, and a wireless network for medical personnel to update patient information.

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HealthSouth plans to invest up to $125 million in the new hospital, which it will build from scratch in Birmingham. But because the hospital will replace an existing one nearby, sale of that land and some equipment will reduce net spending to no more than $50 million, according to HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison acknowledged during a press conference that "lots of systems have to be built" before the concept of a high-tech hospital becomes reality.

Nevertheless, he was bullish that HealthSouth's investment would pay off and that the new facility, scheduled to be up and running in two and a half years, would serve as a prototype.

"All the information about you as a patient would be in one spot," Ellison said. "The idea here is to stop collecting paper."

The health care sector is notorious for being slow to integrate information technology into the daily business of doctoring. HealthSouth came up with the idea to invest in a "digital" hospital only after estimates for upgrading its 100-year-old Birmingham facility, which needed 10 additional operating rooms, new diagnostic equipment and other upgrades, came in at between $60 million and $70 million dollars.

"Health care's been lagging behind," Scrushy acknowledged.

Should it run as smoothly as its backers predict, the new facility powered by Oracle -- built over a single technology platform -- would have enormous potential to reduce errors. In late 1999, the Institute of Medicine issued a study estimating that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die every year as the result of medical errors, provoking a flurry of debate among politicians and physicians. Because all patient data at HealthSouth's proposed new hospital will be entered and accessed electronically, one of the principal causes of medical errors -- messy handwriting -- will become moot.

In addition, storing a patient's information in a single location online will better protect privacy, according to Oracle and HealthSouth. "At the end of the day, it's going to be more secure than it is today," Scrushy says, noting that patients' charts will no longer be "floating around the hospital," so the information can be accessed by many doctors, nurses, technicians and administrators.

One group that almost certainly will benefit from HealthSouth's hypothetical new hospital might be the most important: doctors. As the rise of managed care has made medicine increasingly paperwork-intensive, physicians have found that more and more of their days are spent filling out forms, chasing after charts, or waiting around to pick up X-ray or MRI results. The system HealthSouth proposes will allow doctors to access information anytime, from anywhere.

The financial benefits of the new hospital for HealthSouth are likely to be less dramatic. With architectural plans still pending approval, the company doesn't expect to break ground on the facility until early 2002. And once the facility has been built, it still will be just one of the company's more than 2000 buildings.

"It'll have not a very meaningful effect on [HealthSouth's] bottom line," says Rob Plaza, a stock analyst with Morningstar, but "one thing that I do like about it is the trend that it may be setting if it is successful."

Indeed, HealthSouth already expects to transform some of its existing centers into information technology powerhouses if the prototype goes over well.

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HIPAA privacy rules under fire in Washington
(Computerworld)
Tools, services aimed at health care debut at show
(IDG.net)
A computer system that gets to the heart of the matter
(IDG.net)
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(Computerworld)
Federal net privacy mandate riles healthcare industry
(Network World Fusion)
Reno urges health care IT executives to share information
(Computerworld)

HealthSouth
Oracle

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