Client Success Story - Sparrow Health System

In 1896, a group of women with $400 and a house on Ottawa Street volunteered their time to care for the sick and injured, founding Lansing's first health service. From those humble beginnings grew Sparrow Health System, mid-Michigan's leader in quality, compassionate, cost-effective health care that is nationally recognized for excellence. Today Sparrow has 687 licensed acute-care beds.

Food and Nutrition at Sparrow

Sparrow food service supports four dining areas, catering, and a coffee shop. More than 250 employees provide service for inpatients' and outpatients' nutrition therapies. Food and Nutrition is responsible for patients being treated by many disciplines, including oncology, orthopedic, cardiacthoracic, behavioral health, occupational and physical rehabilitation, hospice, long-term acute care, children center, women's services, mother baby, neurological center, pediatric emergency room, bariatric surgeries, and level one trauma.

Julie Phelps and April Plotnick are the CBORD^® System Administrators. They are responsible for nutritional analysis, creating diets and menus, compiling statistics, and performing trend analysis for food production and staffing. They also develop policies and procedures for computer applications and provide all the CBORD training. Phelps and Plotnick also provide support to over 100 Food and Nutrition Associates.

Starting with CBORD

Sparrow Health System began using CBORD products in 2005 when they implemented Nutrition Service Suite^® (NSS). Sparrow was interested in point-of-care technology to take menu selections in person at patients' bedsides. The staff opted for CBORD's NSS with Bedside Menu Entry. This solution provided the added functionality and the ease of use they were looking for.

In 2007 Sparrow added CBORD's hotel-style Room Service, fully integrated with all the clinical tools in NSS. At the same time they moved from the Bedside Menu Entry process (utilizing a handheld Palm) to a wireless PC tablet that connects real time to Room Service.

Wireless Room Service

The Sparrow team went beyond the traditional room service setup and added Room Service Representatives (RSRs) who work closely with the clinical staff. Protocol is established for every patient to receive a visit from an RSR to determine if the patient would like to order on his or her own, over the phone, or if he or she prefers to be assisted. By encouraging these interactions, patients feel well cared for and enjoy the choices available through Room Service.

In the rehabilitation unit, all patients are assisted. A process was established to use the "hold and fire" feature of Room Service so that all meals can be correctly scheduled around the patients' rehabilitation schedules. Room Service provides flexibility and choice. The wireless Room Service entry provides Sparrow staff an opportunity to have caring interactions with all their patients.

Sparrow provides room service ordering assistance to about 50 percent of their patients. This quality interaction has had an impact on Sparrow's Press Ganey Patient Satisfaction scores. "Scores were hovering around the 60th percentile; six months after Room Service was implemented the scores jumped up to the 90th percentile," Plotnick said, "Patients love the service, and we receive multiple compliments via cards, emails, and word of mouth."

Staff Reactions

After using CBORD's NSS, the staff was most impressed with the integration of Room Service with nutrition analysis, pattern fixing, supplement interfacing, meal food lists, and various reports that were not available in their old system.

Another important benefit they are seeing from this new process is the way that the clinical, nursing and food service staffs are all working as a team and are all feeling rewarded by their ability to improve patient care.

Lessons Learned

Phelps and Plotnick are now experienced in the implementation process and have this advice to share:

• Visit a site that has implemented CBORD NSS.
• The room service menu drives all areas.
  • The menu decides the type of staff for food production (made-to-order vs. batch cook).
  • All menu recipes need to be taste tested, analyzed, and explained to associates, who give the information to the patients.
  • The menu needs to be examined to determine how many different menus are needed based on diet restrictions.
  • The menu needs to be patient friendly and built according to service courses so that it is easy for room service representatives to take orders.
• Before any go-live, TEST, TEST, TEST.

Continuing to Save Time and Money

The next step in Sparrow's progression to fully automate the Food and Nutrition area is to add CBORD Foodservice Suite^® (FSS); they are interested in gaining efficiencies in both production and ordering. These are areas where they will be able to track hard dollar savings as they move forward with CBORD automation.

Comprehensive Solutions

As the leading provider of food and nutrition management solutions, cashless card systems, and integrated security solutions to healthcare facilities, CBORD provides comprehensive solutions to more than 6,000 organizations.

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