Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals (Lincoln and Omaha, Neb.) provides a full continuum of world-class medical and physical rehabilitation services to children and adults throughout the nation. Madonna specializes in rehabilitating patients who have suffered stroke, spinal cord injury, brain injury, complex medical issues and a variety of other serious injuries or illnesses.

Patients at our Acute Rehabilitation Hospital rank in the top 2% nationally in terms of complexity. As Director of Hospital Applications, I have seen patients and families seek out Madonna for its ability to handle these cases of such high complexity. To maintain excellence in providing rehabilitation services, Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals requires a flexible, comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) as its clinical core.

Fulfilling a mission of delivering expert, comprehensive rehabilitation

Using the latest rehabilitative technologies paired with an experienced and knowledgeable staff, Madonna delivers the most progressive, innovative treatment possible.

The IT staff at Madonna knew that going live on Sunrise^TM version 18.4 could only be successful with the collaborative efforts of our talented IT professionals and dedicated clinical team, along with support from the Allscripts partnership.

We put in the effort to understand how Sunrise works. For example, we take ownership of our reports. We have a very large number of reports that we have developed and maintain to meet our end user’s needs.  We also have built the expertise internally that enables us to move our own clinical documentation content between environments. Very few facilities take that upon themselves. That investment in ownership has led us to our success in this upgrade.

Madonna’s valuable advice to others

The Madonna team offers some helpful advice for other organizations seeking to upgrade to 18.4:

• For any project or upgrade, have Allscripts scope the project thoroughly so that you understand how many hours your internal resources need to dedicate to the project and how many Allscripts Professional Services will perform.
• Assess whether you are following bests practices. For example, Madonna found during the upgrade that it had a significant number of Medical Logic Modules (MLMs) that did not follow current best practices. MLMs are packages of computer code that are the building blocks of electronic clinical decision support. Knowing that they needed to be modified before the upgrade would have been helpful.
• Cumulative Update (CU) 2 included new functionality and features, which is different from the typical CU release. FR 4 is expected to include new functionality and features as well. Plan for a more involved installation process and more extensive testing than what you have experienced with previous CU installations.

Madonna plans to integrate with its state Health Information Exchange (HIE) in 2020 to improve interoperability. Upgrading to the latest version of Sunrise was a key step in that journey.

Visit here to learn more about Sunrise.