GEOFFREY COLE, NORWALK HOSPITAL PRESIDENT, NOVEMBER 17TH

Geoffrey Cole of Wilton, president and CEO of Norwalk Hospital, will speak November 17th. His topic will be “Innovative Approaches to Quality Care: The Patient Comes First.”

Mr. Cole joined Norwalk Hospital in August 2004, having previously been President and CEO at Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA. Recognized as a leader in health care quality, Mr. Cole brought patient satisfaction ratings at Emerson Hospital to among the highest in New England through efforts such as innovative disease management programs and migration to a fully electronic medical record.

At Norwalk Hospital, he is working with the Board of Trustees, the Medical Staff and other key constituents to expand the hospital's clinical capabilities and provide the highest quality health care to patients. Norwalk Hospital is a 328-bed not for profit community hospital staffed by 2,000 employees, 600 volunteers and approximately 350 affiliated physicians.

During his presentation to the Y's Men, Mr. Cole will elaborate on some of the hospital's quality initiatives in the areas of new, technology, medication safety, and the adoption of clinical “best practices”.

Norwalk Hospital is committed to investing in and utilizing technology that will enhance patient safety. Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) has been implemented to provide state-of-the-art patient care tools for clinicians. This program enables doctors and health care providers to enter their orders for patients directly into computers in the hospital's continuous efforts to promote patient safety. Studies show that computer order entry improves accuracy, legibility, time of order transmission and quality management. The computer provides an additional safety back up because it is programmed so that it will automatically provide warnings for medication interactions, patient allergies, etc. Computerized Physician Order Entry enables doctors to make decisions on behalf of their patients with more information. By eliminating handwritten orders and offering access to decision support tools, Computerized Physician Order Entry promotes efficiency and enhances patient care.

Norwalk Hospital just received a Gold 2005 Connecticut Quality Improvement Award (CQIA) Innovation Prize for another quality initiative recently implemented, the BD.id™ Patient Identification System. The prize was awarded for utilizing innovative technology to enhance patient care and patient safety and the hospital was cited for “creating better health services, improving resource use, widening communications, enhancing education and increasing safety for all of us.”

The BD.id™ Patient Identification System at Norwalk Hospital enables the health care professional to use handheld computers to scan patient identification bracelets at the bedside before blood is drawn for positive identification. In the case of blood drawing, the scanned information is cross-checked against the physician order that was transmitted to the handheld computers and then a customized bar coded label is generated which the staff affixes to the specimen container. The label identifies the phlebotomist who collected the sample, the date and time of the collection and the test ordered. This ensures accuracy by eliminating the need to manually sort labels and have to match the patients' names to specimens and labels. Most importantly, it guards against incomplete or inaccurate labeling. The hospital recently instituted patient safety rounds so that members of Nursing and the Hospital Administration can review patient care, systems and records to reduce the risk of errors.

Mr. Cole will also address the hospital's commitment to wellness and community outreach. The Medical Staff of Norwalk Hospital will be presenting its 27th annual wellness for the community series this fall. Physicians, nurses and other health professionals volunteer at community health fairs and the hospital provides a television show on wellness topics, called Health Talk, which airs daily on Cablevision Local Programming.

Mr. Cole holds a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Michigan and a Master's of Public Health Degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Regents Fellow in 1979. He has been a regular guest lecturer in the Graduate School of Public Health at Harvard University and the Health Care Management Program at Boston University.