St. Francis Medical Center has achieved a marriage of high technology and age-old bedside manner.

Newly-installed bedside computer terminals in the inpatient neurosurgical unit will improve patient care, hospital officials said.

Other units of the hospital are expected to get the computers in November, said Director of Patient Care Pauline Elliott.

"Less than 3 percent of the hospitals in the country have these, so it's quite a cutting edge," Elliott said. Hospital personnel say the computers will also benefit physicians and patient care personnel.

Among the goals of using the computers is increasing the time nurses are able to spend with their patients. Eventually, they say, the computers, which are mounted on shelves next to a patient's bed and are known as "point-of-care clinical information terminals," will replace the bulky, notebook-like charts now used to record patient information.

Elliott and Administrative Director Cheryl Mothes said the computer terminals will benefit hospital personnel by permitting better organization of information and weed out delays in entering information in a patient's file. Potential handwriting errors also will be eliminated and the system will provide accurate documentation for third-party payers.

"Certainly," Elliott said, "it's one of those win-win situations for everyone involved. The fact that it's `real-time' information also improves the clinical decision-making."

She said she helped prepare a certificate of need for the system, which the Missouri Health Care Facilities Review Committee unanimously approved July 22 in Jefferson City.

The price tag of the project, under study for the past two years, is $1 million. About 250 terminals will be installed, said Elliott, some in the hospital's physical therapy department and pharmacy.

"This will not result in an increase in anyone's (hospital) charges because it increases our efficiency," said Elliott. "It's a way to control costs, not increase costs."

The system is expected to pay itself off in three to four years. Savings are anticipated in part from a substantial reduction in nursing staff overtime.

Each computer terminal offers a "functional keyboard" that permits a user to go directly into the patient information area he or she wishes with the stroke of a key. A few of the board's keys read "Medicines," "Activities," and "Hygiene."

Letter keys don't exist, but number keys do. Elliott said information is entered into predetermined parameters.

Any comments that would need to be added to a patient's file, Elliott said, would have to be done at a nursing station unit, which has a full keyboard. Ninety-five percent of the time information will be entered from the bedside terminals, she said.

The system is customized in that hospital staff members helped to come up with the screen's design, said Elliott. Called "MedTake," the system was developed by MicroHealth Systems of West Orange, N.J.

Since St. Francis has installed the computer terminals, the hospital has had patients that work either as computer operators or in the computer field, said Elliott. They were impressed with the system's technology, she said.

Elliott said she believes the public feels that hospitals have gotten away from "high-touch" care in moving toward high-technology. "This provides the high technology and high touch," she said, "because it increases availability and visibility of the staff."

Mothes said the public perceives that hospitals often waste money on high-technology equipment. But she said the public shouldn't view the computer systems as a bunch of "toys."

"It's high technology, but it's very much for improving patient care. Just having that physical presence in the room, I think is very, very good for health care."

The Friends of St. Francis, a community support organization, helped to financially support the pilot project, said Elliott.