At this acute care hospital, community and physician leadership play key roles.

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Importance isn’t always determined by size. It’s determined by need. In 1986, SSM St. Joseph Hospital West opened as an 88-bed satellite to SSM St. Joseph Health Center. As the community in Western St. Charles County began to grow (it’s in the top 2% in the nation), it was clear the location needed to be more than a satellite.

Pat Komoroski, President

This year, the hospital is in the process of adding a 50,000-square-foot cancer center, in collaboration with one of the county’s largest oncology groups, Missouri Cancer Care, and St. Louis University Hospital. Due to open in the fall of 2008, the center will provide a non-invasive, image-guided form of radiosurgery technology currently offered at only 20 other cancer care centers across the country.

“St. Louis University Hospital will be placing the CyberKnife stereotactic radiosurgery system instrument in the center,” said Pat Komoroski, president of St. Joseph Hospital West. “We’ll have the only CyberKnife between St. Louis and mid-Missouri.”

But the excitement of such advanced technology does not overshadow the true importance of opening the HW Koenig Cancer Center. As cancer care has evolved, technologies and therapies have made it possible for patients to receive the care they need in their home communities. In addition, patients are living longer with cancer, which has enhanced the shift to the community setting. Outpatient chemotherapy no longer has to be performed in a major facility, and follow-up can occur with a patient’s own physician.

“As that shift happened, we saw the community’s desire to receive its cancer care close to home,” Komoroski said. “We’re building this center to be a true healing environment.”

Located in Lake Saint Louis, the hospital’s lakeside view had, until this point, not been fully utilized. The cancer center is located on a cove, and the outpatient area will be enclosed in glass so patients can enjoy the view. Additionally, the entire back of the center will open to windows. “The community center will be in the same facility. We’ll have support and community groups in an environment that is healing, calming, and rejuvenating,” she continued.

The key
On April 1, St. Joseph Hospital West will roll out a comprehensive and fully integrated EMR. The hospital will be the first in the four-state SSM Health Care system, one of the largest Catholic systems in the country, to go online with the Epic EMR, part of an initiative known internally as Project Beacon.

Project Beacon began with the implementation of PACS across the entire SSM Health Care system and continued with the Epic EMR. “An SSM team did a rigorous assessment of a variety of products,” Komoroski said. “Epic was selected as being the best to meet the needs of the ambulatory setting and the inpatient setting.”

Rather than attempting to roll the EMR out in its main facility first, St. Joseph Hospital West instead decided to roll it out in an affiliate employed medical group, SSM St. Charles Clinic Medical Group, in Wentzville, Mo. When the SSM Health Care-St. Louis networks’ other two medical groups go live on the ambulatory portion of the system, it will bring the total to roughly 100 physicians in the community. “Their implementations will tie in seamlessly with the inpatient record,” Komoroski said. “In April, our hospital will be the first in the SSM Health Care system to go live with that.”

The EMR implementation will also bring technologies such as arm-mounted computers and workstations on wheels. Once completed, the hospital will be 100% paperless. And although the administration spearheaded the transformation, without employee and physician buy-in, it wouldn’t have worked. Three hundred of the 600 medical staff members at the hospital will undergo 8.5 hours of training each. More than 760 employees began training in late January, and by March, all physicians will have gone through training as well.

According to Komoroski, one of the most important elements of the success of this project, and the successful and strong relationship she and her administration have with their physicians, is open communication. The other is transparency. “Physicians may not always agree with what a hospital needs to do, but I believe that if you are totally open, have no hidden agendas or secretive or ulterior motives, that they typically understand,” she said. “Again, that doesn’t mean we agree on everything, but we really make a concerted effort to keep those lines of communication open.”

The hospital’s ability to recruit 14 physicians in 2007 shows Komoroski’s commitment to communication is working, both for internal stability and for future growth for the hospital. And as Western St. Charles County continues to expand, that kind of ability will be of the utmost importance. “We value those relationships and take them seriously. We respond with specialty service expansions that meet both the needs of the community and its physicians,” she said. “We aren’t the largest in our system, but it’s not always size that counts.”