After nearly 27 years at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center, Steve Geidt knows a thing or two about stability. But the organization’s CEO also knows when and how to make a change.
In 2005, Geidt completely changed the way Saddleback was run. The hospital’s parent organization, Memorial Care Medical Centers, wanted to go paperless and invested $60 million into the endeavor.
It was a big investment, but the benefits were expected to easily outweigh the cost. Before investing in an electronic medical record system, Geidt’s organization used to copy 3 million pages of paper in a month.
“It was ridiculous,” he says. “Now, it’s down somewhere below 2 million, which is still a lot, but think of the savings in not just paper but trees and the amount of energy people spend running around looking for paper or copying paper or pushing paper around.”
Still, that wasn’t the most compelling reason the organization needed to make this change. Recent studies have revealed that misplaced decimal points and undecipherable abbreviations on prescriptions for medications are legitimate threats to patient safety. Geidt and his staff reasoned that taking the pen out of the doctors’ hands would greatly reduce the risk of transcription errors from hospital staff tasked with decoding a doctor’s handwriting.
“You’ve heard the stories, but many of them were indeed true,” he says. “That’s not to say that errors were rampant, but the potential was there.”
By relying less on handwritten scribbles of a hurried physician, Geidt’s goal was to eliminate that potential. But change is never easy — especially when it involves getting2,700 employees to fundamentally change the way they do their jobs every day.
