Contact: Leonard N. Karp
215-575-3720
lkarp@philadelphiamedicine.com
September 26, 2007
For immediate release:
In this month’s edition:
- U.S. News & World Report Names The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphiathe Nation’s Best Hospital for Children
- J. Robert Beck Named First Chief Academic Officer at Fox Chase Cancer Center
- Unanticipated Consequences of Health Care Information Technology
Editors note: Research, new techniques and improved facilities by Philadelphia International Medicine hospitals and physicians may lead to new ways to treat some of our most challenging diseases. Below are just some examples from our hospitals.
U.S. News & World Report Names The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
the Nation’s Best Hospital for Children
Philadelphia – For the fifth consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report has ranked The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia the best hospital for children in the United States.
The rankings reflect a three-part mix of reputation, death rate and care-related factors such as volume, nursing care, advanced technology and recognition by outside organizations.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was also named the No. 1 pediatric hospital in comprehensive, data-based studies conducted by Child magazine. Children’s Hospital also was recently awarded Magnet Status, the nursing profession’s highest national recognition by the American Nursing Credentialing Center.
Children’s Hospital is one of the leading research and clinical facilities for children in the world. Some of its renowned services include:
- The Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment is one of only two comprehensive centers worldwide and is at the forefront of research and clinical practice in fetology - the treatment of infants before birth. Since its inception in 1995, the Center has grown to receive more than 4,000 referrals from all 50 states and 46 countries.
- The Cardiac Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is internationally recognized for providing comprehensive multidisciplinary care for children with acquired and congenital heart disease. It houses an internationally renowned program in cardiothoracic surgery, as well as the East Coast’s largest heart and heart/lung transplantation program.
- The Division of Oncology is one of the nation’s largest cancer programs dedicated exclusively to children. It also houses an internationally recognized center for pediatric cancer research where researchers are leading the way in classifying and treating neuroblastoma (one of the childhood cancers most resistant to treatment).
- The Newborn/Infant Center treats the most critical neonatal and infant illnesses. The 50-bed unit provides care for all types of respiratory, surgical cardiac, genetic, renal, neurological, hematologic and metabolic diseases. It serves as a referral center for regional, national and international cases.
J. Robert Beck Named First Chief Academic Officer at Fox Chase Cancer Center
Fox Chase Cancer Center has named J. Robert “Bob” Beck, MD, of Riverton, N.J., as the Center’s first chief academic officer, effective immediately.
“The creation of this position reflects our rapidly expanding clinical and laboratory research activities and positions Fox Chase to maintain its elite status as one of the nation’s top cancer centers,” said president and CEO Michael V. Seiden, MD, PhD. As a senior vice president, Beck will serve as a member of the Center’s Leadership Council reporting to the president.
In his new role, Beck will be responsible for the office of sponsored research, office of business development and institutional review board as well as a number of core research facilities and information technology. He will also chair the Center’s long term strategic space planning. Beck will also help foster academic collaborations with a wide variety of national and international universities, research institutions and oncologists. In addition, he will work to launch initiatives for more structured faculty development, mentoring and educational activities.
Prior to his new role, Beck served as deputy director of the population science division and as vice president for information services and chief information officer at Fox Chase.
Beck holds grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG™).
Beck earned his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1974 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins University in 1978 and served his residency in pathology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. With a focus on clinical decision-making, he completed a clinical fellowship in medicine at the New England Medical Center in 1982.
A past editor-in-chief of Medical Decision Making, Beck served on the editorial boards of Disease Management and the Journal of Biomedical Informatics until last year. Beck is a member of many professional and scientific societies, including the American College of Medical Informatics, Society for Medical Decision Making, and the College of American Pathologists.
Unanticipated Consequences of Health Care Information Technology
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) have developed a framework to help hospital managers, physicians, and nurses handle the tough challenges of implementing health information technology (HIT) by directly addressing the unintended consequences that undermine safety and quality.
As documented in a 2005 JAMA article by Penn’s Ross Koppel, PhD, computerized physician order entries, CPOE for short, reduce medication errors due to transcription or hand-writing deficiencies but produce many unintended consequences. For example, in some CPOE systems, physicians must enter the patient’s weight before ordering some types of medications. Physicians will often insert an estimated weight just to order the desired medication, without being able to indicate it as an estimation. Subsequent physicians then use that number for medications requiring more careful weight measurements. Koppel is the principal investigator of an AHRQ-supported study of hospital workplace culture and medication error at Penn’s Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and a faculty member in Penn’s Sociology Department.
In this new paper, co-authors Koppel, AHRQ’s Michael I. Harrison, PhD, and Shirly Bar-Lev, PhD, from the Ruppin Academic Center, Israel, show managers and clinicians how to avoid or catch unintended consequences before they cause lasting harm. This study appears in the September issue of the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association – JAMIA.
Use of sophisticated HIT in hospitals is increasing dramatically. In addition to CPOE, other examples in which unintended consequences can occur are decision support systems and electronic medical records. Health care facilities are investing millions of dollars in health care information technology as they seek to improve patient care, safety, efficiency, and cost savings. Yet the results are often disappointing, say the researchers.
“Managers and clinicians need to prevent more undesirable side effects and recognize unforeseeable consequences early on,” says lead author Harrison. “Then they can take steps to remedy them before damage mounts.”
The authors demonstrate how new HIT changes workplace processes and how practitioners alter these technologies during use. The authors call their new paradigm “Interactive Sociotechnical Analysis.”
“We are strong proponents of HIT,” say Harrison and Koppel. “But introducing HIT is not like adding a fax machine. HIT involves a whole set of activities and interactions with existing IT, people, the built environment, and with other systems. These interactions generate unpredictable developments. We map these developments to inspire greater awareness of IT implementation problems and increased action to improve new IT systems.”
“Decision makers are taking unnecessary risks if they wait for HIT projects to run for a year or two before doing a post-hoc evaluation,” observes Harrison. “Real time evaluations can reveal unintended consequences as they emerge, allowing remedial action to be taken.”