Sharon Milligan - Quality Improvement Analyst
Barb Zellerino - Director of Quality ImprovementSt. Mary’s Medical Center, Evansville, IN
A member of Ascension Health, the nation's largest Catholic-sponsored, not-for-profit health system, St. Mary’s is one of the largest employers in Southern Indiana. St. Mary’s has grown into a health system encompassing numerous health facilities throughout the Indiana region, including St. Mary’s Medical Center in Evansville, IN.
St. Mary’s Medical Center is one of the leading facilities in Ascension Health’s efforts to institute the latest programs and techniques in hospital quality improvement. As the medical center grew, its quality initiatives resulted in many small simultaneous projects lead by inexperienced project managers. All too often projects were initiated that only a few staff members knew were underway.
The center was using a number of stand-alone project management software products for its quality improvement activities that were difficult to network and even harder to learn for those who were not trained on the many products. And, of course, typical of a quality department, there were plenty of file folders full of meeting notes, faxes and other related paperwork.
Sharon Milligan, Quality Improvement Analyst, of St. Mary’s Medical Center, said the move from a traditional paper-based process improvement system to the web-enabled ACORN project management software has made everyone’s job significantly easier and more efficient. And that means significant improvements in providing and maintaining quality care for their patients. |
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With ACORN, collaboration on projects is easy, keeping everyone involved in a project informed of its status on an up-to-the minute basis. All quality department staff members are trained on and have access to the system which has become as common as e-mail in their daily work schedules.
Every user designs their own “dashboard” of projects which appears on the daily log-in screen. Reports supplement this view by providing more detail on any activity which has taken place, and reports can be presented on a weekly, monthly or annual basis.
Specific reports are available with a click of the mouse to point out where progress needs to be made to keep a project on track. The system also reminds users about upcoming process improvement team meetings, work steps that are due, or missing data that needs to be entered. Sharon Milligan noted that today every hospital works with as lean a staff as possible and much of the decision making has moved past middle management to the people on the floor.
Such people may have never been trained in quality or project management, but understand the issues better than many that have.
ACORN provides the structure for those employees to organize their thoughts, and the web provides the technology to let it be shared with any number of authorized stakeholders, all the way from board members to fellow employees. |
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 What Dendress Did |
After seeing a new concept demonstrated at a quality conference, Sharon returned home insisting St. Mary's explore the idea of a comprehensive Quality Improvement system along the lines of the one she saw. She and her director started their search for this new product only to find no one really had one for sale, so they did the next best thing, they contacted the designer of the one she saw and offered him a job.
This was the birth of the Dendress Corporation.
Under Sharon and Barb's guidance, a completely redesigned system was developed as a marketable product that has remained in use ever since. |
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| Implementation Process |
For as powerful as ACORN is, it is an extremely simple application to install and train users on.
After agreeing upon the terms of the license agreement, Dendress Corporation started work immediately with St. Mary's to understand the goals and structure of their Quality Improvement department. Even though St. Mary's selected to have the software installed on their internal servers rather than on a remote Dendress server, the installation took only a few hours and was performed entirely by Dendress personnel. There was no impact upon the hospitals IT staff.
Once the basic software was installed Dendress performed all initial set-up making ACORN a true "Turn-Key" system.
System administrators were selected, on-site training classes were held and with in a few weeks St. Mary's was reaping the benefits of ACORN.
Because ACORN is licensed on an on-going basis, there is little the customer needs to do except use it. All updates are automatically performed by Dendress without customer intervention. |
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