Information Tech

In recent issues dealing with Best Health, U.S. News and World Report listed all four hospitals in Spokane – including the two where our residents train, Sacred Heart Medical Center and Deaconess Medical Center – as belonging to the nation’s “100 most wired hospitals and health systems.”

Even though we live in the land of Starbucks, most wired in this instance means use of computer technology in the delivery of health care. We are very proud of the direction our community and its surrounding rural region are taking in the use of medical computer technology to advance medical care.

Our sponsoring hospitals founded Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS), which is the information technology company in this region that is in many ways leading the nation in using computers to further medicine. All hospitals in the city, as well as 23 rural hospitals, use the same hospital system and network to store their electronic information.

As a resident, you will have access to medical records from multiple hospitals as their patients are transferred to Spokane’s tertiary hospitals.

Wireless Handheld PDAs
The program provides each resident with a wireless handheld PDA. Software that we load onto this handheld includes ePocrates Rx and Clinical Xpert Navigator. Clinical Xpert Navigator allows you to access your patient’s data wirelessly from anywhere within the hospital. You will have updated labs, reports and medications at your fingertips.

UW HealthLinks
We are an affiliate residency program of the University of Washington School of Medicine. As such, we have access to the school’s online medical information resources via UW HealthLinks. Residents access HealthLinks through a browser and this means that you can access this site from within the hospital or even from home. Some of the resources available to you include Up-to-Date, textbooks and full-text journals. In fact, there are far too many resources to list here – just click the link and see what is available. Locked resources won’t be available to view until you become one of our residents.

Residency Blog
The program maintains its own residency blog which is password protected. It is one of the methods we use to communicate with our residents. The blog includes program news items, conference schedules, on call schedules, online text paging for resident pagers, manuals, and even links to PDF versions of the journal club articles we will be reading.

e*Value.net
This is the Web-based online system the program uses for evaluations, procedure logs, and duty hours reporting. The system is efficient and easy to use.

Electronic Health Records
In our clinic, the residency program uses Centricity®, the most widely used ambulatory care electronic health record (EHR) system in the country. General Electric (GE) is the provider of this system and to quote them, this EHR “enables ambulatory care physicians and clinical staff to document patient encounters, streamline clinical workflow, and securely exchange clinical data with other providers, patients, and information systems.” The system is set up so that you can access our outpatient records from within the hospitals. EHRs are the future and part of your training in our program involves knowing how to use EHRs.