GetWellNetwork Automates Clinical and Service Workflows That Improve Patient Satisfaction and Facilitate Electronic Exchange of Information

GetWellNetwork Helps Hospitals Meet Proposed Meaningful Use Criteria for Patient and Family Engagement


ATLANTA, GA--(Marketwire - March 1, 2010) -  HIMSS Annual Conference Booth #7102 -- GetWellNetwork, Inc., today announced that its industry leading interactive patient care solution is well positioned to help hospitals meet the proposed meaningful use guidelines to engage patients and families in the health care process. Using HL7 standards and web services, GetWellNetwork offers integration capabilities that enable information to flow from the patient's bedside to a variety of health information technology (HIT) systems.

GetWellNetwork's solution shares data seamlessly with hospital admissions and discharge systems, electronic medical records (EMR), computerized provider order entry (CPOE), pharmacy, food service and dietary systems, scheduling, transportation, call center, billing, medication systems, and others. Regardless of where the information resides, GetWellNetwork leverages HL7 standards and web services to provide caregivers access to patient-related information and to build effective workflows -- both clinical and administrative.

Through EMR integration, GetWellNetwork automatically populates patient's bedside television with information about new medicines or discharge instructions based on updates in the patient's chart. The system can also follow up with patients at set intervals to remind them if they have not reviewed their medication teaching. Because GetWellNetwork is interactive by design, patients can initiate communication with nurses if they have follow-up questions or simply revisit the information at any time during their stay since all content is available on-demand. This is particularly useful for medication teaching when patients may be prescribed a variety of drugs that are unfamiliar to them. 

"GetWellNetwork is a very widely used tool at Christiana because our nurses can manage a variety of their patients' needs within the same application through the seamless exchange of data between GetWellNetwork and our HIT systems," said Katherine Pereira-Ogan, Director of Service Excellence, Christiana Care Health System. "Nurses can order education for their patients in Cerner PowerChart® and when it's completed, patients' files are automatically documented. Patients are also prompted with satisfaction surveys throughout their stay, which is programmed to trigger a service recovery based on patients' responses. This has helped to increase our patient satisfaction scores significantly." 

At Winchester Medical Center in Winchester, VA, GetWellNetwork has been integrated with bedside barcode systems in order to automate pain assessments for patients on pain medications. Upon administration of the medication, patients are proactively prompted to log the level of pain they feel. The patient response instantly documents the pain assessment into McKesson Care Manager, and also triggers a message to the nurse's pager based on a pain threshold established by the clinical staff. 

A clinical workflow such as this is just one example of the way hospitals can improve patient care and facilitate process automation through data integration between multiple systems. Patient education is another area that hospitals need to improve as part of the meaningful use criteria. With GetWellNetwork, hospitals can provide patients with medical education videos in multiple languages that are tailored specifically to the patient's health condition or provide general educational content such as falls prevention and patient safety. The additional benefit of an integrated patient care system is that nurses do not have to learn multiple systems -- they can order educational videos, track their patient's progress of educational content, and remind patients with key information at any time using the hospital's EMR system.

"We continue to expand our integration capabilities with HIT systems so that patients can be more engaged in the care process and the nursing staff isn't burdened by unnecessary administrative work," said Michael O'Neil, CEO, GetWellNetwork, Inc. "We made a commitment to creating an open platform that can be integrated with various clinical and non-clinical systems. That commitment is enabling our hospital partners to make patient engagement a core strategy for patient care delivery and performance improvement."

About GetWellNetwork
GetWellNetwork, Inc. uses the bedside TV to entertain, educate and empower hospital patients and caregivers to be more actively engaged in their care. This patient-centered approach improves both satisfaction and outcomes for patients and hospitals. GetWellNetwork is the leader in interactive patient care solutions and exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association. More information about GetWellNetwork can be found at www.GetWellNetwork.com.

Contact Information:

Media Contact:
Jenny Song
(703) 338-8434