Information Technology

Informatics is an increasingly critical component of emergency care. Our department and our two primary clinical sites afford great opportunities for involvement on the departmental, hospital and broader levels. The physician group provides financial and data analysis support. Each hospital has highly qualified IT executive leadership and the university has a graduate program in medical informatics. The following is a selective list of live systems and ongoing projects as of spring, 2008:

• KCH ED has an EDIS that is a locally-designed extension of the hospital EMR system. It went live in November, 2005 and supports tracking, reporting, discharge processing, diagnostic order entry and limited documentation. Active projects include:
• Medication and nursing order entry with associated documentation and barcode medication administration.
• Development of a new whiteboard solution that is based upon a medical application portal technology.
• Geospatial tracking.
• Proximity-based authentication combined with single sign-on and virtualized desktops.
• UHB ED has a leading best-of-breed EDIS that has been in place since September, 2007. It encompasses all physician and nursing documentation as well as tracking and discharge processes. Deployment of CPOE is an active project.
• UHB is in the process of implementing a leading hospital EMR that includes inpatient and outpatient documentation and CPOE.
• KCH is part of NYC Health & Hospitals corporation, a public integrated delivery network that includes 11 acute care hospitals that together see nearly a million ED visits annually. The corporation's current clinical systems are very comprehensive and have received several national recognitions and awards. The corporation is in the early phase of a project that will likely replace the existing enterprise clinical system with a leading vendor offering for all major care venues, including inpatient, outpatient and ED.
• Both hospitals are members of NYCLIX.org, a regional health information exchange that is poised to start delivering real-time information into the hands of emergency clinicians this summer.

Your involvement can take the form of being a super-user and helping with training and go-live support, working on the design of an existing project, or developing your own project. Most of our efforts are in applied clinical informatics, but we also pursue publication-quality evaluations of our larger projects and work to support departmental clinical research efforts.

Please contact us if you're interested in more information.

Rusty Peacock, MD peacockp@nychhc.org
Informatics director, EM Physicians of Brooklyn,
Director for information and systems, KCH Emergency Department