When a clinician examines a patient and schedules a procedure, say, a hernia operation, that information will be input into the hospital's Cerner software and sent to Owens & Minor, letting the distributor ship just-in-time customized surgical kits featuring all the dressings, tools, and other supplies needed for the procedure. The clinical information from the Cerner system also will provide specific information regarding whether the doctor performing the surgery prefers a certain type of tool or whether the patient has a latex allergy, requiring the kit to provide nonlatex surgical gloves.

For privacy reasons, the clinical information sent to Owens & Minor won't include patient identification, but instead will be received in aggregate, such as in an order for eight hernia kits with a list of specific requirements. The kits will then be shipped with clinician identification labels to ensure that they're used for the correct procedures. The system will work with Lawson ERP software for billing purposes via Web services so hospitals are properly billed for supplies.

The customized kits reduce costs and time for hospitals because they no longer need employees--most often nurses--to take the various boxes of supplies and manually compile the individual kits. "This can help hospitals better utilize their clinical staff," Guzmán says. "The nursing shortage is the biggest issue in health care right now." The customized kits also will help reduce medical errors, because they're prepackaged based on the Cerner clinical information directly sent to Owens & Minor.

These new services likely will be available to customers by year's end, Guzmán says. Besides Cerner and Lawson, Owens & Minor is planning similar Web-services efforts with other clinical and ERP software vendors.

Despite the productivity improvements these types of systems offer, not all medical professionals, particularly doctors, embrace such technology. They weren't enthusiastic about one innovative effort: computerized drug systems, a key technology that health-care companies are under pressure to adopt. Such systems require doctors to abandon writing prescriptions by hand, something that many doctors find difficult give up.

During the past year, business groups such as the Midwest Business Group on Health and industry watchdog organization LeapFrog Group have been urging health-care companies to employ IT that can improve patient quality of care and cut costs. Electronic drug systems are high on the wish lists of these groups. The success of drug-ordering systems is very much dependent on process and cultural change, says Ivo Nelson, CEO at HealthLink, a health-care IT consulting group.

CareGroup Healthcare System senior VP and CIO John Halamka, himself a doctor, agrees. Halamka realized early that cultural and process changes would be the greatest challenge to his company's development of an electronic prescription system two years ago. He asked about 35 doctors and clinicians to collaborate in the initial planning. "About 15% of my time on the project involved the software and technology, and the other 85% involved workflow, organizational, and process changes," he says. His efforts have paid off: Since the drug-ordering system became operational last year, medical errors in CareGroup's six Boston-area hospitals have been reduced by about half.

Other health-care industry players are taking different approaches to using IT to ultimately improve care. Quest Diagnostics Inc. CIO Gerald Marrone says development and investments in IT infrastructure and systems to support the laboratory-testing company's advanced diagnostics organization will be increasingly important during the next 12 months. The advanced diagnostics group focuses on genomics, or medical testing related to genetic diseases. IT investments will boost Quest's genomic research and development.

Quest's IT budget is about 6.5% of its $3.6 billion revenue. While that percentage remains stable, actual dollar spending is up because of increasing revenue generated by the Teterboro, N.J., company's acquisitions, including the November 2001 purchase of MedPlus Inc.

HealthLink's Nelson says the trend among health-care companies in recent years has been to spend more on IT, but the additional spending often doesn't result in anticipated return on investments because companies don't make the process changes needed as part of the technology implementation.