On Wednesday, Catholic Healthcare West announced plans to increase its system-wide budget for electronic health records to more than $1 billion, the San Francisco Business Times reports.
CHW's board of directors originally allocated $590 million to implement acute-care and ambulatory information systems at all of its 41 hospitals over the next seven years.
However, after successfully implementing EHR systems at eight California locations, CHW decided to increase spending by $419 million to expand the initiative to hospital-based and community physicians (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 2/24).
The EHRs will include new patient tools and safety applications, including medication bar coding systems (Reiter, Merced Sun-Star, 2/25).
CHW Chief Information Officer Ben Williams said the health care system will pay less per hospital to implement the EHR system because it gained installation experience during the pilot phase of the program (Robertson, Sacramento Business Journal, 2/24).