During the pandemic, our IT Department’s expertise was critical to ensuring that HealthFirst addressed the needs of our patients and the many staff members who worked remotely. While doing so, the Department still worked on important projects needed to make HealthFirst a world-class health care facility. Here are just some of the important projects on which our IT Team worked.
- A dual-sided interface (orders and results) was created with Quest Diagnostics for future collaboration with lab orders, such as COVID tests. This resulted in the elimination of analog faxing and paper.
- IT redesigned our eCW Telehealth Software to allow for telehealth appointments.
- They worked on a single sided interface (results) with SouthCoast Radiology that allows for the importing of results directly into our EMR. This project, which will be completed in 2021, will also eliminate some analog faxing.
- Electronic discharge summaries were implemented with both Steward hospitals and SouthCoast hospital (for our patients emergency room or inpatient visits), connecting each side’s EMR, that directly import the summaries into our EHR. This process also removes the use of analog faxes. New problems or medications are rarely missed during our patient’s “transition of care” visits.
- IT assisted the Facilities and Security Department to procure and implement a top of the line (cloud based) security system that significantly improves the safety of our staff and patients. Our facility was upgraded from using 6 analog cameras to 34 high definition cameras.
- The Department implemented Cisco Jabber and Cisco Expressway (softphones) which allows providers and staff to receive and make calls at home. We would not have been able to have staff work remotely starting in March of 2020 without this important implementation.
- IT also completed an in-depth penetration test on both our internal and external networks to help remove any vulnerabilities. Remediation work will be completed in 2021.
- The Department completed a social engineering test with our entire staff (fake spam email asking for credentials, etc.) to determine who opened the link, etc. Training was then completed with our staff to help reduce this user liability in the future. In addition, an “external” tag was added to our email system, so users now know when they replying or reading an email from an external sender.
- IT also replaced our outdated SAN (Storage Area Network) with a top of the line storage system that is five times the size of old and space limited server. Space was becoming scarce on a lot of our main servers, and now this is no longer an issue. This new system also includes active monitoring at all times with HP, as there is a hybrid cloud support system as part of the device.
Pictured left to right: Vuthy Mao, Help Desk Technician, Dave Lira, Help Desk Technician, Mike Filipe, Information Technology Manager and Systems Administrator, and James McCarthy, Information