Case Study: Mercy Health achieves better patient safety and risk management with PerfectServe

PerfectServe helps hospital manage risk and improve patient safety

Mercy Health’s St. Rita’s Medical Center in Lima, OH, a 419‑bed hospital with a 1,000+ member medical staff, faced persistent clinical‑communication challenges including untraceable call timelines, poor legibility of handwritten physician orders, and uneven physician responsiveness — problems that had previously contributed to costly legal exposure. To address these risks, the health system implemented the PerfectServe clinical communications system and PerfectServe Analytics to route messages by workflow and document every contact event.

PerfectServe provided automatic, timestamped documentation and detailed analytics for roughly 180,000 clinical communications events annually (about 15,000 per month), enabling St. Rita’s to reconstruct communication timelines, identify outliers, and track where illegible orders originated. Using PerfectServe’s prompts and reports, the hospital reduced order‑clarification calls from more than 80 per week to about 53 (a >40% drop), opened constructive dialogues with physicians based on objective data, and lowered safety and legal risk while improving overall responsiveness.

Mercy Health

Randall King

CMIO and Chief of Staff