The Lahey Clinic, a physician-led, nonprofit healthcare organization based in Burlington, Mass., is preparing to implement an enterprise-wide electronic medical record.

The EMR project involves the clinic's two acute care medical centers and will establish an interoperable platform to leverage a prior investment in an ambulatory EMR solution for its outpatient settings.

The Lahey Clinic will leverage Eclipsys' Sunrise Enterprise Platform, which includes Sunrise Acute Care, Sunrise Pharmacy and Knowledge-Based Charting solutions, to establish an EMR with clinical decision support.
The solutions reside on the Eclipsys XA extended architecture, an open end technology platform that enables healthcare providers to share information securely among disparate systems both inside and outside the organization.

"We sought a partner that could provide superior clinical solutions, clinical content and a shared vision for interoperability," said Sandy Kurtz, MD, chief operating officer at the Lahey Clinic. "Eclipsys demonstrated to us that they would be the best partner to collaborate with us in utilizing technology to support high quality and safe patient care across our campus, as well as enhancing our institution's acclaimed high acuity service areas."

"In addition, Eclipsys' willingness and technical capability to leverage existing Lahey technology solutions was attractive to us. We look forward to a successful implementation and fully taking advantage of this opportunity for significant clinical and operational benefits," said Kurtz.

The project will give clinicians access to new tools, including e-prescribing and orders reconciliation capabilities, along with a shared enterprise-wide view of the patient's latest administered medications, lab and test results. Elipsys' Knowledge-Based Medication Administration, a bar-coded medication administration system, will be used to support nurses in validating the five rights of medication administration.

Clinic officials say the computerized physician order entry solution will be deployed in a staged rollout.