The $1 million computer upgrade continues at Macon County General Hospital.

The hospital is in the process of improving its Hospital Information System.

“We started working on it back in October,” said Gary Bean, director of IT for MCGH. “It won’t actually be finished until about June.

“When we get through, we’re going to have a state-of-the-art system that even some of the larger hospitals around can’t really compare to.”

Once completed and operational, the new system will do away with paper records. All records eventually will become completely electronic.

In preparation, Bean said the hospital has installed new hardware, new servers and miles of cable.

It’s all part of going paperless.

“If you are a patient in our facility, by the time you get discharged and everything’s done, your record will be completely paperless and only exist in electronic form,” Bean said. “They may not always take all your vitals and put them directly into the computer. They may write them down and then put them into the computer.”

Still, those “cheat sheets” will be discarded once the information is entered into the computer.

“It seems to be going smooth,” MCGH Executive Dennis Wolford said of the upgrade. “This is going to be much better for our patients. We’ll be able to get our patients registered quicker. Doctors will be able to access patient information quicker. We’ll be able to maintain privacy very, very well.”

Upgrading the system can be broken down into four phases:

Phase I dealt with financial records and went live Feb. 1.

“That’s doing well,” Bean said. “It’s taking a little while to get used to. It will probably be six months before everybody has really used it enough to feel comfortable with it and get to the point where they don’t have to think about it.

“This replaces a system we had before that all it had was the financials. Everybody had been using it for about 14 years, so they never had to think about it much. With the new one, it’s a good system and it does a lot of stuff. It just takes time to get used to the change.”

Phase 2-A dealt with clinical applications and went live March 29.

“Clinical applications include patient care,” Bean said. “It takes electronic medical records and takes a lot of the paper out of the process.”

Phase 2-B deals with the PACK system and is scheduled to go live April 19.

This system deals with digital storage of all x-rays.

Phase 3 deals with CPOE, which stands for Computerized Physician Order Entry and is scheduled to go live about June 1.

“CPOE will give our physicians the ability to place orders for patients directly from the physicians’ office or anywhere else they have access to an internet connection,” Bean said.

Bean said most of the staff of MCGH has never had to deal with computerized patient care. There has been a bit of a learning curve.

Overall, Bean said the upgrade is going “about as we expected.”

Hospital staff has been in training for about the last month.

Two patient rooms and a conference room were converted to training rooms for the staff. Each training room has four to six computers.

Once the system is complete, hospital patients will have the ability to pay medical bills online, view insurance information and even look at medical records online.

“You’ll have to go through some security things that will be set up by the hospital,” Bean said. “It won’t be something you’ll just be able to do. We’ll have to allow you to do that so we can verify who you are and all that stuff. It’s going to be a thing a lot of hospitals don’t have.”

The vendor for the system is HMS out of Nashville. Previously, the hospital has used a vendor out of Mobile, Ala.

“They did good phone support,” Bean said of the Mobile-based vendor. “Sometimes, there’s only so far that will go.

“With our new vendor, they tell us that if we talk to them on the phone for an hour and they can’t figure it out that it will be cheaper on them just to send somebody up here in person.”