More data means better care, and to that end Lourdes Hospital has expanded its Web-based clinical portal.

The 375-bed hospital in Paducah, Ky., part of the Catholic Healthcare Partners Network, is working with the Informatics Corporation of America to provide clinicians with a single technology for accessing, evaluating and acting upon patient information received across disparate systems.

The hospital contracted with Nashville-based ICA last July to aggregate data from several healthcare information systems and provide a tool allowing physicians to monitor, assess and treat patients across the various treatment settings in and around the Paducah area.

The technology collects data from the hospital's core information system as well as laboratory, radiology, quality-assurance, ambulatory electronic medical records and other supporting clinical systems, yielding a comprehensive patient record.

Lourdes Hospital and ICA initiated a pilot launch in mid-December with an affiliated primary-care physician office. Today, less than six months from contract signing, the ICA solution is enabling providers to remotely view admission status, diagnostic results, clinical reports and radiological images of their patients in the hospital.

The hospital is now embarking on an aggressive rollout to its other affiliated physicians in the community.

"The system's intuitive user interface and physician-accommodating workflow made its use a natural extension of practicing medicine," said Craig M. Slater, MD, regional chief medical officer of Mercy health Partners-Kentucky and CMO of Lourdes Hospital. "Training was quick and easy, and pilot participants were able to continue seeing a full patient load during the implementation process."

Steven Grinnell, Regional CEO of Mercy Health Partners-Kentucky and president and CEO of Lourdes Hospital, said the ICA team worked with the hospital's IT team, executives and physicians.

"As we continue our rollout of the application and add to its functionality, we look forward to the benefits it will bring to the community, the physicians and our hospital," Grinnell said.

ICA's solution extracts information which is updated in real time from the source systems and displays it on electronic flow sheets available to physicians anywhere they have Internet connectivity.