Sisters of Mercy Health System is putting money and people on a project to improve patient care through information technology.

The St. Louis-based system, which includes 18 hospitals in four states, is investing an estimated $226 million on its four-year Genesis Project. It is pulling together leaders from both inside and outside the organization to build an information technology-supported program to make the hospitals safer and more efficient. Improvements could include streamlining patient registration and making patient information available electronically to doctors and nurses.

About 70 employees were recruited over the last three months, mostly from Sisters of Mercy's hospitals and health centers to work on the project full time. The project's staffers, who are working out of a 22,000-square-foot office recently leased in Maryville Centre, include people from the organization's information systems, finances, clinical services and supplies departments. New

people are being hired to fill those old positions, said Barb Meyer, Sisters of Mercy spokeswoman. The number of people working on the project is expected to grow to 100, said Bob Schimmel, executive vice president for Sisters of Mercy.

A few project managers were recruited from outside the system, Schimmel said. They include Olivia Kirk, vice president of operations, formerly with the national health-care business unit of CapGemini Ernst & Young in Chicago, and Jeff Bell, chief of application services, who had worked as administrative director of information services at Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. in Memphis. Rounding out the leadership team from inside Sisters of Mercy are Steve Mattachione, vice president of enterprise resource planning, formerly chief financial officer for Mercy Health System in Oklahoma; Jay Guffey, vice president of clinical systems, formerly clinical vice president at St. John's Health System in Springfield, Mo.; and Donna Chandler, corporate director of revenue, previously director of health information services and clinical transcription for St. John's Mercy Health Care in St. Louis.

A combination of salaries, technology costs for hardware and software, and "external resources," including contracting with consultants and information systems builders, accounts for the estimated cost of the program, which is being paid out of Sisters of Mercy's operating budget, Schimmel said. Revenue for Sisters of Mercy was $2.7 billion in 2003, according to a report on the organization's Web site.

"We're redesigning our processes for more standardization and to raise quality," Schimmel said. That includes adopting "best practices" from hospitals and health-care centers both within Sisters of Mercy and at other health-care organizations.

Possible improvements include allowing patients to register where they are being treated, instead of at a central check-in; allowing nurses to file patient information electronically, instead of filling out paperwork; allowing nurses, physicians and others to look up medical records electronically from a variety of places, including at a doctor's office; giving employees self-service access to vacation, compensation and benefits information; and improving bill paying and supply ordering.

Sisters of Mercy's Genesis Project comes about the same time as national attention is focusing on the issue. In April, President George W. Bush set a goal for every American to have an electronic health record within 10 years, and a new U.S. Health and Human Services office was set up to coordinate the project, according to an article in the May issue of Modern Healthcare.

Several large health organizations, including HealthSouth Corp., Kaiser Permanente insurance and the University of Massachusetts system, have launched similar information technology initiatives, said Bob Cimasi, president of St. Louis-based Health Capital Consultants. Sisters of Mercy's initiative is exciting, he said. "I think it shows some real market leadership."

Sisters of Mercy is not alone locally in trying to improve its operations via information technology. SSM Health Care, which owns, operates and manages 19 acute care hospitals, has tackled improving supply, human resources and accounting systems in the last few years, said Jon Kimerle, project manager for SSM's clinical transformation project. The project's focus includes computerizing the entry of physician orders, moving radiography from film into digital form and creating more electronic health records. SSM is selecting vendors and will start implementing improvements in June 2005, with systemwide implementation to take place over four to six years and cost in excess of $100 million, Kimerle said.

About 4,000 SSM doctors already use Web-based sites that allow doctors to access lab results, drug allergy and other patient information from their offices or home, said Dr. Paul Convery, executive vice president and chief medical officer for SSM in the St. Louis region.

"People are amazed that, as sophisticated as health care is, all physicians and hospitals still operate out of a series of paper files," Convery said. Everybody has recognized the need for electronic health and other records, and now vendors have the products to make sure it happens, he said.

BJC HealthCare also has invested recently in several information systems programs, including a computerized system called DoseChecker that evaluates prescriptions for dosing inaccuracy; PharmADE, which screens for problems such as potentially dangerous drug combinations; computerized physician-order entry; and online registration, which has been available at several hospitals for years.