ProTouch, Kindred’s proprietary electronic medical record (EMR) system, helps clinicians paperlessly access and manage important patient information including vital signs, medications, progress notes and lab and radiology results. ProTouch monitors in patient rooms are continually updated as needed, and interface with a patient’s ventilator in order to provide real-time respiration information. Recent enhancements to the system include documentation and display of multi drug-resistant organisms with flagged alerts, and improvements to the searchability of transcribed reports including display by date, report type, dictator and signature status.
The next big thing? ProTouch will soon be available as an app for the iPad, allowing our clinicians to access and update important patient information even more efficiently.
“Many of our physicians, especially in our integrated care markets, travel between several hospitals to see their patients each day, and by having a ProTouch app on their iPads, the information they need will be as mobile as they are,” said Terry Carrico, Senior Director of Hospital Clinical Development for Kindred Healthcare. “Our physicians needed a consolidated current view of their patients to use while rounding and creating orders, and this app will meet that need.”
The app, to be rolled out in early 2013, will provide a patient list personalized to each physician and a snapshot of the patient’s condition, with information on labs, medications, transcription and vital signs such as blood pressure, temperature and respirations. Physicians can scroll back and forth through the information with the swipe of a finger, and can touch any given area if they want more information. The first phase of the ProTouch app will provide physicians with access to a “Rounding Report” on their iPads.
Kindred purchased ProTouch 19 years ago and has an in-house development team to develop and improve the application each year specific to the long-term acute care hospital environment. ProTouch is used by about 40,000 Kindred clinicians, sees more than 400 million transactions per month (more than any other application at Kindred, including email or Internet Explorer), has a faster response time than any other Kindred network application, continues functioning even if disconnected from the corporate data center and is updated and improved weekly, with 100-150 augmentations and improvements released each year.
“I think this enhancement is a tremendous step forward in tailoring ProTouch to meet the needs of physicians,” said Sharon Barnard, Regional Senior Director for Clinical Operations in Kindred’s Hospital Division. “The dashboard format facilitates decision making for busy, mobile physicians, which I think will enhance our ability to transition care settings in a more seamless fashion.”