L.A. Downtown Medical Center Case Study
How Azalea Health’s EHR supported the hospital’s growth in beds, patient volumes, and revenue.
About L.A. Downtown Medical Center
L.A. Downtown Medical Center (LADMC) is a 212-bed hospital serving a culturally diverse patient population in downtown Los Angeles. LADMC is one of only two hospitals in the city of Los Angeles to receive a fivestar rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in January 2020, said Dilip Niranjana Jay, IT administration lead at LADMC.
Physicians there were frustrated by the cumbersome user experience of their EHR, which made for endless clicking and time-consuming documentation. Many felt like the EHR had been designed more for regulatory compliance and billing than for improving patient care. The EHR also was exorbitantly expensive, executives said, especially for a smaller hospital like LADMC. It was an on-premises solution, as well, so there were significant IT, maintenance and consulting costs involved.
Their Journey to a Five-star CMS Rating
In 2019, Azalea Health proposed to LADMC to deliver an EHR offering that would be easy to implement and adapt, lightweight, and straightforward to integrate with other technologies. The documentation and patient charts would be configurable by workflow, provider type and patient population – without coding changes or the involvement of IT resources.
“This would reduce reliance on change requests and expensive consulting services to customize our workflows, lowering maintenance costs,” Jay said. “Fields could be expanded, hidden or customized based on specialty and need, ensuring the data would be relevant to the providers using them.” With these new changes, LADMC became one of two hospitals in the city of Los Angeles to receive a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in January 2020
