Mount Desert Island Hospital and Health Centers launched a new electronic health record system on Monday, March 7. The new integrated system marks a major milestone for the hospital as it replaced multiple legacy systems to enhance patient safety and information security, but the upgrade has not been without its challenges.
“We’ve heard from our community that referrals to outside health care providers have not been going through since we launched our new electronic health record system,” said Oka Hutchins, MDI Hospital spokesperson. “We want to notify our community of this challenge and provide support as we work to resolve all delayed patient referrals as quickly as possible.”
When the hospital was made aware of the system issue, it was immediately corrected for current and future referrals. Hospital and health center personnel are now working through a backlog of about 650 referrals that were stuck in the system and had not been processed between March 7 and May 12. As of this notice, 20 percent of these referrals have been processed.
“MDI Hospital is committed to providing safe, transparent patient care, and has established safeguards to ensure this type of delay does not happen again in the future,” said Hutchins. “We are very sorry for any delays that may have been caused by this issue.” Additional resources have been added to get the referral backlog corrected as soon as possible, and a referral call line has also been set up to help those effected.
If you have questions or concerns about a recent referral, please call MDI Hospital’s Referral Hotline at 207-801-5555 or contact your providers office. MDI Hospital will continue to address the backlog of referrals until all delayed referrals have been processed.
