Opening Statement of

 William P. Thompson
Senior Vice President—Strategic Development
SSM Healthcare, St. Louis, Missouri

 ASQ Health Care Panel
For the 21st Century Health Care Caucus
Washington, D.C.
April 26, 2006

Good afternoon. My name is Bill Thompson and I am the senior vice president for strategic development for SSM Health Care, St. Louis, MO. SSM Health Care is the tenth largest Catholic health care system in the United States, with 20 hospitals, three skilled nursing facilities, a centralized information center, a home care company, employed physicians and a series of joint ventures and partnerships with physicians and others. We provide services in the states of Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois and Oklahoma.

We serve over 1,000,000 outpatients and over 100,000 inpatients every year. SSM Health Care generates over $2 billion of revenues, employees over 23,000 people, and is affiliated with over 5,000 physicians. In 2005, SSM Health Care provided over $33 million in charity care and over $44 million dollars of health care to Medicaid recipients above what was reimbursed. Earlier this year we had to significantly reduce the scope of services in our home care and rehabilitation services due to cuts in the Missouri Medicaid program. And driven primarily by changes in the Medicare program, we recently closed two rehab units in two of our hospitals, resulting in the layoff of almost 100 people.

I present this background to provide a context to SSM Health Care’s story about building a world class information system.

As a multi-hospital system, SSM Health Care has a long tradition of implementing standardized information systems across all of SSM Health Care. Three years ago, we completed the installation of a common business system called SAP which cost over $20 million. This system allowed us to more quickly report our financial status, improved our supply chain management and human resources reporting, and provided more meaningful operational and financial data on a real time basis.

In early 2005, SSM Health Care made the decision of fully implement a digital radiographic imaging system (commonly called a PACS system) and an electronic medical record system. This was a decision that was not taken lightly. Over the next two years, SSM Health Care will spend over $60 million to fully implement PACS, and we estimate capital costs in excess of $125 million and expenses of close to $120 million to fully implement an EMR over the next nine years.

PACS and an EMR will completely transform how care is delivered at SSM Health Care. We are taking advantage of this opportunity to not only install a software application, but to rethink and redesign how patient care is delivered, with the intent to further our mission of delivering exceptional health care services. Upon the full installation of the EMR, we will convert to a completely paperless system and will be able to make all patient information available to the patient and his/her provider anytime, anywhere within our system and beyond.

So, what is the impact of this transformation. We have high expectations, and in fact will monitor our performance over the next nine years to insure we accomplish:

--An overall improvement in patient safety by reducing adverse drug events through decision support for medication ordering and automatic checks for drug interactions and dosing requirements, and the elimination of errors caused by hand written orders.

--Better adherence to standards of care based upon evidenced based medicine that yield more effective, less costly and better outcomes for patients.

--More prompt diagnosis and therapeutic interventions.

--Better utilization of scarce resources, through reducing utilization of unnecessary tests and procedures.

--Better regulatory compliance.

--Reduced length of stay.

--Use of bar codes and RFID devices to ensure accuracy of medications as they are delivered to the patient.

--Improved patient satisfaction and compliance through having all past and present information, i.e., laboratory, radiology, cardiology, physician notes, etc., readily available at the time of the patient/provider interaction regardless of location, hospital, clinic or office.

--Provide treating physicians complete access through secure web links to the specific radiographic and cardiology images regardless of their location. This technology will also provide multiple physicians, say a radiologist, cardiologist and cardiovascular surgeon, to view images simultaneously from different locations.

The EMR should also provide significant benefits to staff and the patient by:

--Reducing redundant data entry

--Improving work flow.

--Less chance of lost or missing information

--Making information readily available to the patient, via secure web access, so they can take a more active role in managing their disease, or making the information more available to other providers they have been referred to.

The implementation of the EMR will affect nearly every employee and physician at SSM Health Care. Even though the implementation will be phased in over the next nine years, design/build/validate teams representing every one of our hospitals are being organized to begin the design of the EMR at SSM Health Care.

The implementation of an electronic medical record is just the most recent example of SSM Health Care’s commitment to quality improvement that started in 1990 when we introduced the principles of Continuous Quality Improvement to SSM Health Care. Our quality journey resulted in SSM Health Care becoming the first health care recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2002.

And our journey continues today. We continue to support initiatives across our system to improve the quality of patient care, improve patient, employee and physician satisfaction, and to drive financial results that will support the necessary capital investments, including EMR, into the future.

But our success is highly dependent upon the support we receive from the federal and state governments. Nearly half of our annual revenues come from governmental programs. To continue our mission of providing exceptional health care to all regardless of ability to pay, we need your continued interest in the issues facing the health care industry.

Thank you.

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