A Paperless Hospital, 2009

December 2009 · The building stands in the hospitals file

The claim, dated before the fact: The replacement hospital that opened on Holy Cross Parkway in December 2009 stands whole in the hospitals file — its cost and size conflicts printed there, its 254 private inpatient rooms, its diagnostic and treatment core of emergency, imaging, surgery, catheterization and interventional radiology and cardiology. The practice fact is this section's, and it was documented before the doors opened. The University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, surveying the region's hospitals' move to electronic records in 2009, wrote of the new house: "The new Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, when it opens later this year in Mishawaka, will be paperless, allowing information about patients to be moved around more efficiently." A hospital designed from its foundations around the electronic medical record — no paper chart to move, because the record was the system — was itself the advancement, and the contemporary account dates it to the opening. It prints at that account's strength: a pre-opening description by the region's business school, not an auditor's verification, and no source reached measures the plant's paperlessness in operation.

The rehabilitation unit: The same December brought the system's rehabilitation practice into its modern form: the Saint Joseph Rehabilitation Institute, a forty-bed inpatient rehabilitation facility on the Elm Road campus, opened in December 2009 as an off-campus, distinct-part unit of the acute hospital, and within the year its operators had agreed to take it into a joint venture and seek its licensure as a freestanding rehabilitation hospital — the course the hospitals file carries forward to the Rehabilitation Hospital of Northern Indiana that opened at Edison Lakes in 2020. The institute's opening is dated here because it belongs to the practice record: rehabilitation as a distinct, separately organized discipline on Mishawaka ground, with its own unit and its own licensure course, begins in the record in December 2009.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business, account of regional electronic health record adoption, 2009 (the "paperless" passage, quoted).
2. Tradeline, 11 December 2009 (the replacement hospital's opening and program).
3. Tonn and Blank Construction, project record (the diagnostic and treatment core: emergency department, imaging, surgery, cath/IR, interventional cardiology).
4. RehabCare Group and Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, joint-venture release, third quarter 2010 (the Rehabilitation Institute: forty beds, opened December 2009, distinct-part unit; the joint venture and freestanding licensure course).
5. The hospitals file of this build (the 2009 campus whole; the rehabilitation line to 2020).