Children's Hospital of Orange County: Technology Innovation

Technology innovation is critical in a hospital environment as institutions seek to leverage technology that will enhance patient care, create efficiencies and automate business processes when practical. This is the essence of high performance in health care: optimizing and integrating technology and business skills to ensure that exceptional patient care is provided consistently and efficiently.

The Children’s Hospital of Orange County, California (CHOC) wanted to better integrate clinical functions with business functions to help streamline the health care services it provides to the community. It determined that Accenture’s health care consulting group possessed the right combination of skills, experience and project management capabilities needed to make this happen.

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For the Children's Hospital of Orange County, technology innovation is a priority and an ongoing challenge.

One of the best and most recent examples is its journey toward process automation, including improving automation of patient access, clinical and billing functions. CHOC wanted to better integrate the clinical functions with the business functions to help streamline health care services it provides to the community. In effect, CHOC's leaders set out to create a special kind of health care environment—a model of technology-enabled efficiency and patient care.

CHOC executives knew that the skills, experience and project management capabilities needed to make this happen were different from those that a hospital typically employs. After carefully researching the field, they determined that Accenture's health care consulting group possessed the right combination of skills, experience and project management capabilities. Focused on helping health care concerns attain and sustain high performance, this unique Accenture group includes operations expertise as well as seasoned project management, process design and implementation resources.

Accenture's principal challenge was the scope and uniqueness of CHOC's technology mission.

The magnitude of the project also made it unique in the industry. Accenture assisted CHOC in launching a new pharmacy system, a key mission of which was the implementation of a paperless Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) application and the subsequent elimination of paper in pharmacy dispensing. The team built out additional functionality, enhanced the charge master suite of applications and implemented a new patient accounting system. Through each of these initiatives, Accenture provided process and technology design expertise, implementation assistance, project oversight and end-user support.

Key to the success of this multi-year, multi-faceted program was Accenture's use of its Accenture Delivery Methods (ADM) approach. ADM is a standardized project-management framework for building and delivering reliable solutions and services. It captures and applies the experience, insights and leading practices gleaned from thousands of Accenture engagements. On CHOC's behalf, Accenture leveraged ADM to create customized project management tools, executive- and detail-level project plans, customized agendas and project formats, a testing database (equipped with issue logs, resolution forms, status checkpoints, condition and script tracking) and a standardized executive-report-generation capability.

High performance in health care is a unique achievement. Most critical are operations that are patient-centric—providing the best possible care regardless of circumstance. However, excellent hospital systems combine great care with great efficiency. They benefit patients and themselves by stressing minimal wait times, streamlined administration, efficient scheduling, rapid test-reporting and simple, accurate billing.

The Children's Hospital of Orange County is closer than most of its peers to having a fully integrated clinical and financial system that concurrently excels in patient care and operating effectiveness. In health care, that is what high performance is all about.

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