Doylestown Hospital

Ensuring Availability of Reports and Data Whenever Needed

Doylestown Hospital is a regional healthcare leader serving patients in the northern suburban communities of Philadelphia. Founded in 1923 by the Village Improvement Association (V.I.A.), which still owns the hospital today, Doylestown Hospital has 247 licensed beds and over 420 physicians in more than 40 specialty areas. Areas of clinical focus include cardiology and cardiovascular surgery, maternal-child health, emergency medicine, critical care, cancer care, interventional radiology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, pulmonology, urology, rehabilitation and robotic surgery. In addition, Doylestown Hospital houses a certified chest pain center, a joint commission-certified primary stroke center and advanced imaging services.

In 2006, the IT Applications team at Doylestown Hospital started looking for the right disaster recovery system to meet its information access and distribution needs during unscheduled downtimes of its MEDITECH Healthcare Information System. During the course of its research, the hospital learned about Interbit Data and its downtime protection and report distribution products.

Delivering Critical Reports and Data to All Clinicians Involved in Patient Care

Doylestown Hospital first purchased MPrint Server and then later NetSafe, Interbit Data’s downtime protection and business continuance solutions. NetSafe retrieves clinical reports from MEDITECH and stores them locally for access in the event that MEDITECH goes down.

The hospital then installed NetDelivery, Interbit Data’s report distribution software, for distributing all reports originating from various areas of the hospital, such as the emergency department, radiology and the lab, to doctors’ offices and other clinicians around the hospital.

“We use NetDelivery to serve like a post office and fax clinical reports from MEDITECH to the clinicians involved in a patient’s care,” explained Jared Rubinsky, project leader for financial systems at Doylestown Hospital.

The hospital also uses NetDelivery to send MEDITECH reports to managers via email. This process helps reduce paper usage, as the reports go direct to email instead of a printer. With NetDelivery, users have the option of sending reports via email, fax, encrypted file or direct to a printer.

“We like that if a report is being sent to a printer that is down or out of paper, we can easily re-route it to email,” added Rubinsky. “That is a cool feature that ensures the report is still delivered no matter what.”

The hospital also uses NetDelivery for delivering smaller and non-medical reports to email, which saves time by not requiring someone to go to a fax machine to send stacks of reports.

Improving Communications Across the Organization

Doylestown Hospital not only likes that NetDelivery gets critical patient reports to the clinicians who need them, but it does it automatically.

“I usually go through my day without thinking about it,” shared Rubinsky. “NetDelivery scans the report to see who it goes to and automatically sends it to that person or group. When the emergency or radiology departments make updates to a patient’s record, that information is automatically transferred to their physician’s office’s fax machine.”

By keeping doctors informed about their patients and delivering vital information to them in a timely manner, NetDelivery enables Doylestown Hospital to enhance communications to its community.

Realizing Benefits That Impact Business

In addition to reducing paper waste, Doylestown Hospital has realized several benefits from NetDelivery’s electronic report distribution, including a dramatic decrease in the number of man hours needed for report distribution as a result of eliminating manual processes.

“We also have the ability to create a sense of redundancy if we want to,” added Rubinsky. “We can resend reports from NetDelivery at any time and can switch from sending via fax to sending via email. We can pull up reports from last year to resend via fax, email or direct to printer. We can also create an audit trail of what reports have gone out, which helps with proving a report was sent.”

Doylestown Hospital currently employs NetDelivery 6.0, an upgrade that is compatible with MEDITECH 6.0. It was one of the first healthcare facilities to move to MEDITECH 6.0, yet it had no issues converting from NetDelivery Magic to NetDelivery 6.0.

“The NetDelivery 6.0 integration with MEDITECH 6.0 was smooth,” reported Rubinsky. “A change occurred with the physician mnemonics reports in MEDITECH 6.0, but that has been handled well by NetDelivery 6.0.”

The hospital has also never had any problems or errors with NetDelivery. In fact, NetDelivery has been useful for finding and proving errors that occur with MEDITECH, which it does through the lab telecomm feature. Whenever the hospital has needed support, Interbit Data has been very responsive.

“They like to take care of any matter themselves and they work their magic very well,” reported Rubinsky.