Beaufort Memorial Hospital becomes a Health Data Management “EHR Game Changer”

Congratulations to Beaufort Memorial Hospital (Beaufort, SC) for its recent feature in Health Data Management as an “EHR Game Changer.” The article focuses on Beaufort’s CIO and vice president of information systems, Ed Ricks, and the cultural changes he put in place to encourage clinician adoption of electronic systems. After an initial CPOE implementation failure, Ricks came onboard with the hospital and started listening to physicians regarding what went wrong. Lessons learned include never underestimating how difficult change can be and that technology needs to run invisibly behind the scenes. "If we focus on making the software as invisible as possible to the workflows, we'll have better luck getting the physicians to adopt the systems - if they're not using it, it's really just an I.T. experiment, and no one wins in that case," Ricks says.

To help with these issues, Beaufort joined forces with Forward Advantage to implement Imprivata’s single sign-on with badge readers. The technology has greatly simplified the log-on process for the hospital’s clinicians, who previously had to remember up to eight different passwords to access their applications. Now, these applications (such as MEDITECH’s EHR and CPOE) can be accessed with only one password, and workflow is easily suspended and resumed with badge readers and virtual desktops. To read the article in full, please click here. More information on Beaufort’s single-sign on implementation can also be found in the Forward Advantage customer story.