2001

Cincinnati Children's eHealth Team Earns CHCA Silver Award

Tuesday, July 03, 2001

CINCINNATI -- The Child Health Corporation of America (CHCA) has awarded Children's Hospital Medical Center of Cincinnati's eHealth team with a Silver Award for its work on using Internet content as a patient education tool.

The Patient Education Program (PEP) and Heart Center Encyclopedia sites were used as samples of eHealth's team effort to develop and organize the content on the medical center's collaborative website.

The sites were judged by four healthcare consultants based on comprehensiveness of the plan or project, results to date, responsiveness and user friendliness. A total of 18 hospitals participated with over 30 entries submitted.

The creation of the Patient Education Program was led by nurses and individuals from the Patient Services department to reflect the practice of Cincinnati Children's. It is currently used as a tool for patients and families to help answer questions about child health topics like conditions, home care, medications, pain management, wellness, tests and procedures.

The Heart Center Encyclopedia was developed because of the need for good, easily accessible sources of information about congenital cardiac disorders written at an appropriate level for patients, their parents and their primary care provider.

Peter Manning, M.D., director of Cardiothoracic Surgery and editor of the Heart Center Encyclopedia remarks, "Thanks to eHealth, the Internet offers an excellent platform for making this information available to the public."

Cincinnati Children's eHealth department manages the operations of the medical center's 14,000-page Web site at http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org. The eHealth department is made up of 15 professionals providing Infrastructure, Content & Creative and eTransformation Services. Each service is lead by Arvind Kumar, vice president of eHealth.

"The CHCA award further reinforces our committment to providing value to children and families through patient education content that is trustworthy and easy to access," says Mr. Kumar.

CHCA brings executives and physicians from 38 children's hospitals together to share insight, needs and solutions. It is the nation's only alliance that focuses on the core business needs of children's hospitals. Comprised solely of non-competing children's hospitals, CHCA has Member Hospitals in 17 of the top 20 U.S. metropolitan areas.

The alliance represents more than 19,000 physicians, 60,000 employees and $450 million spent yearly on medical/surgical and pharmaceutical products. Driven by Member-hospital CEOs and executives, CHCA is a valuable resource for its Members.