Anyone who loves trees should have reason to rejoice — implementation of the Essentris clinical documentation and electronic medical-record system throughout UCLA Healthcare means far fewer firs will be felled in the name of record keeping.

With the final “go-live” of Essentris at the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA in September, the in-patient nursing units of all four UCLA Healthcare system hospitals (UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA and NPH) have been wired with the paperless charting and database-management tool.

“My experience with Essentris has been awesome,” says pediatric nurse Christine A. Noblejas, RN. “It is very user friendly and intuitive. I can’t imagine how we used to chart and communicate with a multidisciplinary team before.” While it may have been challenging for some staff who were not computer savvy to adapt to Essentris, “overall I think that most everyone would say it definitely is a great improvement over the old paper system,” Noblejas says.

The Essentris system completely automates, standardizes and streamlines the patient-care documentation process for each hospital, replacing manual charting and helping clinical staff to collect, record, store and access patient data via computers at nursing stations in each unit, as well as via wireless carts at patient bedside. By eliminating the need for paper charting, the system’s electronic health record — designed to adhere to HIPAA-compliant patient-confidentiality regulations — helps to reduce or avoid duplicate entries and errors and to improve patient safety.

Implementation of Essentris throughout the UCLA Healthcare system has been ongoing for several years, says Ellen Pollack, R.N., who oversees implementation of IT systems for the Department of Nursing. It took that long to fully roll out the system because of the time involved in training staff to use this tool.

Each training class could accommodate only about 10 people, and the training needed to be timed within two weeks of when the system was due to go live in each unit. “We rolled out one unit every three or four weeks,” Pollack says.

Once the system was up and running, support was provided by Medical Center Computer Services, as well as by “super users” — nurses who were specially trained as in-house experts.

“I am something of a computer person, but I was a bit overwhelmed during the training,” recalls Jennifer Clark, an R.N. in the pediatric intensive care unit at Mattel Children’s Hospital. “But after a while, I was amazed at how easy the transition was. On the day we went live, everyone was charting with Essentris like they’d been doing it forever.”