Greater Baltimore Medical Center Leveraging Standardized Practices to Improve Patient Outcomes

Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) has been recognized as a HIMSS Davies Award winner. GBMC is one of only two hospital organizations globally that have been selected as a Davies Award winner for a third time.

GBMC rapidly scaled a video visit platform to all ambulatory practices and locations, which showed an increase in volume from 59 telemedicine encounters in February 2020 to 13,436 telemedicine encounters by May 2020, more than a 22,670 percent increase.

In addition to the video visit platform, GBMC launched a virtual environment to support multidisciplinary tumor boards (MDTBs) collaboratively discussing diagnoses and cancer stage during the pandemic. This virtual environment facilitated more than 500 MDTBs since February 2020. COVID-19 has driven an average decrease of 46.4 percent for initial cancer diagnoses throughout the United States. However, due to the virtual environment, GBMC saw an 17 percent decrease in cases since the onset of the pandemic.

Finally, GBMC optimized its heparin drip order sets by using data analytics to identify barriers within the current workflow. The new order set interface improved therapeutic activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT) with patients reaching a therapeutic state within 24 hours by 340 percent since the original implementation in 2019.

Greater Baltimore Medical Center Case Studies:

• Using the Electronic Health Record to Innovate the Multidisciplinary Tumor Board Case Study
• Leveraging Standardized Order Sets to Improve Patient Outcomes in Anticoagulation Therapy Case Study
• Rapid Expansion of Video Visits during an International Pandemic Case Study

HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence

The HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence showcases the thoughtful application of health information and technology to substantially improve clinical care delivery, patient outcomes and population health around the world. The Davies Awards program promotes HIMSS’s vision and mission by recognizing and sharing use cases, model practices and lessons learned on how to improve health and wellness through the power of information and technology.

“I am grateful to our Informatics, Analytics and Clinical leaders for this fabulous accomplishment. Their combined expertise and focus has once again shone the light on the use of our core competency, redesigning care, to move us even faster towards our vision.,” said Dr. John B., Chessare, MD, MPH, FAAP, FACHE, President and Chief Executive Officer of Greater Baltimore Medical Center Health System. “Offering our patients video visits throughout the pandemic has improved access to care and removed barriers in ways we celebrate.”

“In our journey to high reliability, these initiatives have proven effective in helping to make care safer through systematic design that integrates technology and evidence-based care.  It is our vision to provide the care we would want for own loved ones every time and by redesigning our heparin drip orderset,  we improved our time-to-therapeutic aPTT by more than 100% in 18 months ,” said Carolyn Candiello, MA, CPHRM, Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety of Greater Baltimore Medical Center Health System. “Patients, staff, and providers all have benefited from the results we obtained.”