Five Questions With: Dr. Timothy Babineau

"There are many benefits to having an electronic health record (EHR) from birth, not only for providers, but for patients and their families, too."

(Updated, 6 p.m.)
Dr. Timothy Babineau, a board-certified surgeon, is president and CEO of Lifespan, which recently initiated the most complete electronic medical records system in the state. The new system got its start with the recent birth of Cameron Benjamin Stewart at Newport Hospital, who became the first child registered. Moving forward, medical records will be attached to individuals in the Lifespan system from birth onward.

PBN: What kinds of problems does having an electronic health record from birth help prevent?
BABINEAU:
There are many benefits to having an electronic health record (EHR) from birth, not only for providers, but for patients and their families, too. With a single EHR that is as comprehensive and robust as LifeChart, information can be shared seamlessly throughout the Lifespan system, from our hospitals and clinics, to our ambulatory centers and community partners. One integrated record provides us with the foundation to easily chart each patient’s care and health condition and provide more coordinated care. For a baby born at Newport Hospital, he or she starts with an EHR that will follow the child throughout his or her life, providing critical information to future providers. The benefit is also for parents, who through our patient portal, MyLifespan, can access their child’s record and schedule appointments, email with their child’s providers, review lab tests and monitor health information, among many other things.

PBN: If a patient needed to be seen by a non-Lifespan provider in an emergency situation, could the provider get access to the electronic health record? If not, is that something that you’re interested in developing as a service?
BABINEAU:
Yes, there are two ways non-Lifespan providers can access LifeChart. LifespanLink is the portal through which community providers can view their patients’ medical records when those patients are seen at Lifespan hospitals or facilities. They can view notifications of various patient events, such as visits to a Lifespan ED and admission to and discharge from a Lifespan hospital. Community providers can communicate with Lifespan physicians through electronic messages and can request additional services, such as referrals, but cannot add to the record. LifespanLink is free and accessible to any community provider, after a simple enrollment process.
In addition, any health care provider who currently uses an Epic EHR (Epic is the software platform for LifeChart) can access patient information through CareEverywhere with the ability to view the patient record and add to it. This feature allows us to easily share crucial patient information with any other facility using Epic. Many hospitals and academic health centers around the country are using Epic.
LifeChart also makes it easy for us to send after-visit summaries, lab test results, radiology reports and continuity of care records to CurrentCare, Rhode Island’s health information exchange. LifeChart also allows for providers to query CurrentCare about their patients.

PBN: It sounds like the technical side of this was pretty involved – can you speak to that?
BABINEAU:
Implementing LifeChart was a two-year process that involved hundreds of staff members from across the Lifespan system. Staff spent thousands of hours identifying, validating, testing, learning and training to create LifeChart. An entirely new IT infrastructure was built and deployed to support the systems needed to run LifeChart. We deployed the highest-performance processors and storage to run the system. We rolled out thousands of new PCs, monitors and dozens of other types of devices and integrated them. When it came to go-live on March 29, several hundred staff worked throughout the night overseeing the conversion of 25 systems and hundreds of millions of data points into LifeChart. It was a remarkable effort demonstrating the expertise and determination of our staff.

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PBN: Will Lifespan be adding new functionality to the system on a constant basis, or is the system already so far along that it will suffice for a period of time?
BABINEAU
: We are very proud of all of the innovative ways that we have built the system. At the same time, we are excited to continue to improve on where we are now, to finish projects that we decided to save until after go live, and to take on even more functionality in the short- and longer-term future. Even though we now have one of the most state-of-the-art EHRs anywhere, we are viewing this go-live as just the beginning.

PBN: Did the first parents you asked give their consent for their child to be the first in the system, or was consent not an issue?
BABINEAU
: LifeChart serves as our official record of a patient’s care, much the way paper records or other systems worked prior to LifeChart. When the first parents came into Newport Hospital on March 29, we had already “flipped the switch” on LifeChart, so this baby, and all subsequent babies, now have an electronic record, instead of just a paper one.
It’s important to note that patient privacy is a top priority for Lifespan and LifeChart doesn’t circumvent our established treatment consent procedures.

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