WATERTOWN — Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown will use millions in state funding to help pay for an upgrade of its electronic medical record (EMR) system, transitioning the hospital system to a single, unified platform across all clinics and specialty services. The health-care provider will use a Statewide Health Care Facility Transformation Grant totaling nearly […]
WATERTOWN — Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown will use millions in state funding to help pay for an upgrade of its electronic medical record (EMR) system, transitioning the hospital system to a single, unified platform across all clinics and specialty services.
The health-care provider will use a Statewide Health Care Facility Transformation Grant totaling nearly $22 million for the effort, per its website.
The investment will modernize Samaritan’s infrastructure; streamline clinical workflows; and “significantly enhance the patient experience” by providing one secure, easy-to-navigate patient portal for online health information.
The need for a unified EMR “has been evident for several years” as Samaritan Medical Center has continued to grow.
Operating multiple EMR systems has created “inefficiencies” for physicians and staff; led to “complex and duplicative” workflows; and required patients to navigate as many as three different online portals to access their health records. The grant represents a “critical step forward” in addressing these challenges and ensuring Samaritan’s technology “keeps pace with the care it delivers and meets patient’s expectations.”
“This funding comes at a critical point in our EMR journey,” Tom Carman, president and CEO of Samaritan Medical Center, said. “We started the project management and needs assessment before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cost to upgrade and update our back-end infrastructure and main EMR system has been daunting. Without this critical funding, this project would have been delayed several more years, since there are only so many capital funds each year to allocate.”
Besides Samaritan Medical Center, the state also awarded Rome Health
$18.9 million through the same program to advance health-information technology, cybersecurity, and telehealth across its network. Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in Ogdensburg also won state funding under the same program.
The awards are among more than $300 million in new state funding to support health care transformation projects across New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Dec. 12.
The grants, made through the Statewide Health Care Facility Transformation Program IV and V, will support 22 projects aimed at improving health-information technology by expanding patient electronic-medical records, strengthening cybersecurity, and patient-information security, and expanding telehealth services.
