Soarian Update

Over the last 6 months we launched two new Soarian applications to help us become a fully integrated health system with integration among all our applications. Our vision for the future includes a fully mature suite of Soarian applications that will include inpatient clinical documentation, CPOE, scheduling, emergency room documentation and ordering, and other applications still in planning stages. Integrating our inpatient documentation into our Health Information Exchange-HealthLINK will allow us to have a full picture of our patients' data including medications, allergies, laboratory and radiology results, advance directives, and more.

Our “go live” for Soarian in June was a major event and although it was a success, it was far from perfect. Our IT clinical staff is working very hard to overcome the issues that you, the users have identified as either problems or extra steps in the process of placing orders. We fully recognize the inherent potential risks of operating in a dual environment and hope to overcome this problem by mid-year 2010. We were unable to go live with Soarian CPOE as part of our launch due to safety issues identified in the Soarian CPOE application. These issues have been corrected in our current release and we have already started the 'Soarian CPOE build.' We are planning to launch Soarian CPOE in June of 2010.

Our challenges are to improve our service to our physicians and to communicate better. I will be reaching out to some of you for help in how to achieve these goals. I fully understand the frustrations of not being able to use hardware or software for whatever reason, while we are busy and need to review results or place orders. IT and I need to address the issues but we need your feedback on your priorities and preferred methods of communication.

This work represents a giant leap forward toward Danbury Health Systems' goal of becoming a fully integrated digital medical community. Our efforts will place all of us on the cutting edge of care delivery providing the highest quality care efficiently and seamlessly to the communities we serve.
Thanks for your patience and support! Happy and healthy New Year!

Eric Jimenez, MD