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COWs are roaming the halls of Baton Rouge General Medical Center.

It’s OK. These are “carts on wheels,” and they’re proving very useful in managing patient care. COWs, essentially portable computer oracles for every aspect of patient information, is one manifestation of Baton Rouge General’s $16 million makeover of its information technology infrastructure.

The General isn’t the only hospital upgrading IT, though it is doing a lot in a hurry. Digitizing medical records and every other aspect of running a hospital is the future for health care and, for many industries, the present.

It’s not cheap, but it’s likely to save hospitals millions of dollars in the long run by reducing the kinds of errors that carry serious consequences for patients and expensive fallout for hospitals in the form of malpractice suits.

The purpose, says chief financial officer Dionne Viator, is to bring the General into the digital age.

“It is a complete transformation,” she says. “This is going to replace many of our existing systems. We’re about four months into the process.”

The point is efficiency and accuracy. Nurses with COWs, for instance, are able to multitask at the patient’s bedside rather than making multiple trips.

“It will change the way a nurse works if they’re not going back and forth to get their supplies, their pharmaceuticals,” Viator says. “The nursing station’s not going to be the hub of activity anymore.”

COWs serves as a portal to patient information, documents, lab results and pharmacy information and even carries meds and supplies. Everything has a bar code. It cuts down on the human capacity for error. Doctors place their orders directly into a PDA instead of writing it down on a piece of paper for another person to decipher. Previously there was no guarantee it would be interpreted correctly.

Instead, the order is filled by a robot that identifies meds by bar code and packages them for each patient. The packages go into the COW. Nurses identify themselves with a bar code when administering the drug, identify the patient with a bar code and the drug.

“Right medicine, right time, right place,” Viator says. “That is the pharmaceutical piece.”

According to some estimates, 100,000 people die each year in the United States because of medical mistakes. Viator says the General’s goal is “zero defects”—an unrealistic goal in the past but now achievable with today’s IT tools.

The General’s software vendor and consultant in the upgrade process is McKesson Corporation, the largest health care company in the world. The hardware comes from Dell Computer. Viator says McKesson has installed projects like this for other clients but not to this magnitude.

“We will be their largest user of the carts on wheels nationally,” she says.

The practice of medicine is largely bound by tradition, and not all doctors are eager to make the jump from paper prescription to PDA. But they’ll do it if it gives them more quality time with the patient, Viator says.

“What do clinicians complain about? Too much paperwork,” she says. “That’s what you’re going to hear when you talk to physicians and nurses. And much of that documentation we can’t do anything about. It’s required by insurance companies or the government. What we can do is make it simpler.”

The General isn’t the only one going electronic. COWs also dot the corridors of Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center. Stephanie Mills, chief information officer and chief medical information officer for the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, of which the Lake is a part, says the hospital recently achieved “stage six” of the Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model of the national Healthcare Information and Management System Society. The Lake is one of only a dozen hospitals in the country that have reached level six.

“It’s for hospitals that have very high level of adoption in terms of integration of technology within our daily business and clinical practice,” Mills says. “We’re very excited about that status. It points to the fact that technology has become an integral part of our work flow.”

The Lake is building an electronic database that will cover ambulatory clinic patients as well as hospital patients, says Mills, who’s involved in restructuring IT within the entire Franciscan Missionaries health system. Wander the halls of the Lake and you’ll see nurses armed with PDAs with built-in scanners to track every iota of patient care. Paper patient charts are history. The Lake’s emergency room department is already automated and paperless.

Mills says getting up to speed is key to patient safety and quality-of-care strategies—something the Lake has been about for years.

“The Lake has been very much an early adopter in health care IT,” she says. “It’s been a 10-year commitment to date.”

Woman’s Hospital’s assessment and recovery departments have already gone fully electronic with their records, spokeswoman Jodi Conachen says. Labor and delivery, which deals with more complex information, is next. Eventually all departments will be electronic. And yes, look out for COWs at Woman’s in the future.

“It’s building blocks,” Conachen says. “It’s putting the pieces together.”

Ochsner Medical Center Baton Rouge, formerly Summit Hospital, uses the Ochsner Clinical Workstation, which allows patient records to be retrieved electronically from any Ochsner location in Southeast Louisiana. The system saved the medical records of Ochsner Health System patients after Katrina, though many non-Ochsner patients weren’t so lucky.

In the year and half since Ochsner came in, the Baton Rouge facility has installed a picture archiving and communications system and updated its transcription methods, says spokeswoman Amy Delaney. Hospitals & Health Networks magazine has named Ochsner Health System one of the nation’s 100 most wired the past four years.