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News & Promotional Materials
Planting the Seeds of Success
Evansville, Indiana – Oct. 2003 -- This fall St. Mary's Medical Center of Evansville, Indiana, planted a crop of acorns in hope of a quality harvest.
Not the acorns that grow into oak trees, but the new consolidated quality and process improvement system named ACORN which they helped develop with the Dendress Corporation of Buffalo, New York.
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As St. Mary's continues the ACORN roll-out all departments will eventually be trained and have access to the system which will become as common to the daily workflow as e-mail. Every user designs their own "Dashboard" of projects which appear on the initial log-in screen. Reports supplement this view by giving more detail on any activity which has taken place on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. |
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ACORN, which stands for A Collaboration Of Resources Network is exactly that, an intranet based software package which puts everything regarding process improvement in one place. This includes everything from data and graphs to notes and attached documents. Gone are the days of file folders full of meeting minutes, faxes and hand drawn or Excel generated graphs. Now everything is in one convenient location accessible from anywhere within the company by every authorized user. Not only is the data accessible it is searchable.
Previous manual systems lacked a network approach to process improvement and all too often projects were initiated that only a few knew were underway. Now with the ACORN system in place, collaboration on projects is easy, it keeps all informed of the project's status both verbally and graphically. |
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Specific reports are available to point out where progress needs to be made to keep a project on track. Warning systems are also incorporated into the system to remind users of upcoming PI team meetings, missing data that needs to be entered or work steps that are about due to be reported on.
Barbara Zellerino and Sharon Milligan of St. Mary's deserve to be congratulated for having the vision to make St. Mary's one of the first health systems in the country to move from the traditional paper-based process improvement systems to a network-based system which will certainly help place them at the head of the industry when it comes to providing and maintaining quality care for their patients. |
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