I've never said Midland Memorial Hospital was perfect, but over the past three years I have seen more positive articles written about the new systems in place at MMH in MAJOR national news outlets than one would expect from a small town hospital.

The Wall Street Journal offers up the latest article in "tomorrow's" edition. Here is an interesting item from the article regarding the "stick and carrots" in the Stimulus Bill to do what MMH is already doing:

The federal government has offered both a carrot and a stick, neither of which, some fear, will make modernization more affordable. It has earmarked nearly $20 billion in stimulus funds as an incentive for hospitals to use electronic records by 2011. And it will penalize those who don't use them, cutting a percentage of their Medicare payments starting in 2015. Once fully phased in, the penalties could amount to a loss of $3.2 million annually in Medicare funding for the average 500-bed hospital, according to a new report from PriceWaterHouseCoopers. But the incentive payments for using health information technology -- about $6 million by the fourth year for the same hospital -- are "a small carrot compared to the amount of resources it will take to deploy this technology over the next five years," the report says.

Here are some interesting statistics regarding MMH in the article:

At Midland Memorial, doctors and nurses can retrieve patient records, lab results and X-ray images instantly. In the past, it could take hours and even days to gather them all. The system helped the hospital catch up on a $16.7 million coding and billing backlog for about 4,500 patient records in four weeks, which might have taken five or six months to do.

In the 18 months after the system went live hospital-wide in June 2006, the hospital reduced medication errors and patient deaths. Infection rates dropped 88% thanks to guidelines in the record system that prompted nurses to follow infection-control procedures, such as changing a dressing or following correct procedures when inserting a new IV.

Bed sores were also reduced as the system prompted nurses to turn patients in their beds at a set number of hours depending on their condition to prevent the sores. And Midland was able to increase by 77% its staff compliance with guidelines to care for patients on ventilators, which, if not followed, can lead to pneumonia.

Vote how you like, but MMH has been moving forward, not backwards in it's delivery of healthcare to the citizens of Midland.