Today’s hospital leaders face countless challenges–clinical, financial, and technological. Becker’s Hospital Review spoke with Steven Gabbe, MD, Chief Executive Officer at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center about implementing electronic heath records and much more.
Another cultural change was implementing our electronic medical record system throughout our health system. The transition from paper records to only electronic ones required participation in all departments. In October 2011, we threw the switch to systemwide electronic medical records. It was the “big bang.”
With this change, we had to educate over 14,000 people to be well-versed in the EMR. We worked really hard to give everyone the resources they needed to learn it. Having EMRs is so important for quality and safety and determining patient outcomes. Now we actually have over 100,000 patients who have access to their records on OSUMyChart. They don’t have to call the office or wait for the doctor to call them — they can go to OSUMyChart and communicate electronically with their physicians.
