EHR to EHR Transitions: Establishing and Growing a Knowledge Base

Author(s):  
Jennifer Herout ◽  
Jason J. Saleem ◽  
Matthew Weinger ◽  
Robert W. Grundmeier ◽  
Emily S. Patterson ◽  
...  

Although numerous healthcare organizations have transitioned from one electronic health record (EHR) to another or are currently planning a transition, there are few documented artifacts, such as published studies or operationalizable resources, that offer guidance on such transitions. This panel seeks to begin a conversation about human factors considerations in EHR transitions from a legacy system. Panel members will discuss current literature and research on the topic as well as experiences with and lessons learned from transitions within their organizations. Panel discussion can be expected to identify new research opportunities, needed resources, and guidance for EHR vendors or healthcare facilities in the midst of or preparing for an EHR transition. Panelists will also lay out systemic issues that need to be addressed at the national policy and regulatory level. This topic is relevant not only to full-scale EHR transitions, but also has applicability for significant EHR version changes.

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Schumacher ◽  
Robert North ◽  
Matthew Quinn ◽  
Emily S. Patterson ◽  
Laura G. Militello ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Diane Meyer ◽  
Elena K. Martin ◽  
Syra Madad ◽  
Priya Dhagat ◽  
Jennifer B. Nuzzo

Abstract Objective: Candida auris infections continue to occur across the United States and abroad, and healthcare facilities that care for vulnerable populations must improve their readiness to respond to this emerging organism. We aimed to identify and better understand challenges faced and lessons learned by those healthcare facilities who have experienced C. auris cases and outbreaks to better prepare those who have yet to experience or respond to this pathogen. Design: Semi-structured qualitative interviews. Setting: Health departments, long-term care facilities, acute-care hospitals, and healthcare organizations in New York, Illinois, and California. Participants: Infectious disease physicians and nurses, clinical and environmental services, hospital leadership, hospital epidemiology, infection preventionists, emergency management, and laboratory scientists who had experiences either preparing for or responding to C. auris cases or outbreaks. Methods: In total, 25 interviews were conducted with 84 participants. Interviews were coded using NVivo qualitative coding software by 2 separate researchers. Emergent themes were then iteratively discussed among the research team. Results: Key themes included surveillance and laboratory capacity, inter- and intrafacility communication, infection prevention and control, environmental cleaning and disinfection, clinical management of cases, and media concerns and stigma. Conclusions: Many of the operational challenges noted in this research are not unique to C. auris, and the ways in which we address future outbreaks should be informed by previous experiences and lessons learned, including the recent outbreaks of C. auris in the United States.


Author(s):  
Jason J. Saleem ◽  
Jennifer Herout

This paper reports the results of a literature review of health care organizations that have transitioned from one electronic health record (EHR) to another. Ten different EHR to EHR transitions are documented in the academic literature. In eight of the 10 transitions, the health care organization transitioned to Epic, a commercial EHR which is dominating the market for large and medium hospitals and health care systems. The focus of the articles reviewed falls into two main categories: (1) data migration from the old to new EHR and (2) implementation of the new EHR as it relates to patient safety, provider satisfaction, and other measures pre-and post-transition. Several conclusions and recommendations are derived from this review of the literature, which may be informative for healthcare organizations preparing to replace an existing EHR. These recommendations are likely broadly relevant to EHR to EHR transitions, regardless of the new EHR vendor.


Author(s):  
Trevor Hall ◽  
Monika Kastner ◽  
Susan Woollard ◽  
Christine Ramdeyol ◽  
Julie Makarski ◽  
...  

In Canada, over 15,000 residents of long-term care have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic representing 59 percent of all COVID-19 deaths (National Institute of Ageing, 2021). Urgent research and subsequent applied action are needed to save life and quality of life including the presence of family (CFHI, 2020). Social and physical frailty are major systemic patient safety gaps and are challenges for most healthcare organizations. This practitioner-led panel of experienced human factors, implementation science and healthcare experts used a case study of a project at North York General Hospital’s Seniors’ Health Centre in Toronto to discuss how these challenges can be addressed with serious games. The project discussed used games that aim to reduce social and physical frailty through exercise while interacting with remote families. Lessons learned to-date and challenges observed, in rapidly implementing safety and human factors programs intended to create resilient residents in a real healthcare context were discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 757-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Benkert ◽  
P. Dennehy ◽  
J. White ◽  
A. Hamilton ◽  
C. Tanner ◽  
...  

SummaryBackground: In this new era after the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, the literature on lessons learned with electronic health record (EHR) implementation needs to be revisited.Objectives: Our objective was to describe what implementation of a commercially available EHR with built-in quality query algorithms showed us about our care for diabetes and hypertension populations in four safety net clinics, specifically feasibility of data retrieval, measurements over time, quality of data, and how our teams used this data.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from October 2008 to October 2012 in four safety-net clinics located in the Midwest and Western United States. A data warehouse that stores data from across the U.S was utilized for data extraction from patients with diabetes or hypertension diagnoses and at least two office visits per year. Standard quality measures were collected over a period of two to four years. All sites were engaged in a partnership model with the IT staff and a shared learning process to enhance the use of the quality metrics.Results: While use of the algorithms was feasible across sites, challenges occurred when attempting to use the query results for research purposes. There was wide variation of both process and outcome results by individual centers. Composite calculations balanced out the differences seen in the individual measures. Despite using consistent quality definitions, the differences across centers had an impact on numerators and denominators. All sites agreed to a partnership model of EHR implementation, and each center utilized the available resources of the partnership for Center-specific quality initiatives.Conclusions: Utilizing a shared EHR, a Regional Extension Center-like partnership model, and similar quality query algorithms allowed safety-net clinics to benchmark and improve the quality of care across differing patient populations and health care delivery models.Citation: Benkert R, Dennehy P, White J, Hamilton A, Tanner C, Pohl JM. Diabetes and hypertension quality measurement in four safety-net sites: Lessons learned after implementation of the same commercial electronic health record. Appl Clin Inf 2014; 5: 757–772http://dx.doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2014-03-RA-0019


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (7) ◽  
pp. 848-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Whalen ◽  
Emily Lynch ◽  
Iman Moawad ◽  
Tanya John ◽  
Denise Lozowski ◽  
...  

Abstract Objective While the electronic health record (EHR) has become a standard of care, pediatric patients pose a unique set of risks in adult-oriented systems. We describe medication safety and implementation challenges and solutions in the pediatric population of a large academic center transitioning its EHR to Epic. Methods Examination of the roll-out of a new EHR in a mixed neonatal, pediatric and adult tertiary care center with staggered implementation. We followed the voluntarily reported medication error rate for the neonatal and pediatric subsets and specifically monitored the first 3 months after the roll-out of the new EHR. Data was reviewed and compiled by theme. Results After implementation, there was a 5-fold increase in the overall number of medication safety reports; by the third month the rate of reported medication errors had returned to baseline. The majority of reports were near misses. Three major safety themes arose: (1) enterprise logic in rounding of doses and dosing volumes; (2) ordering clinician seeing a concentration and product when ordering medications; and (3) the need for standardized dosing units through age contexts created issues with continuous infusions and pump library safeguards. Conclusions Future research and work need to be focused on standards and guidelines on implementing an EHR that encompasses all age contexts.


2015 ◽  
Vol 06 (02) ◽  
pp. 334-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Wright ◽  
M. Krousel-Wood ◽  
E. J. Thomas ◽  
J. A. McCoy ◽  
D. F. Sittig ◽  
...  

SummaryBackground: Clinical knowledge bases of problem-medication pairs are necessary for many informatics solutions that improve patient safety, such as clinical summarization. However, developing these knowledge bases can be challenging.Objective: We sought to validate a previously developed crowdsourcing approach for generating a knowledge base of problem-medication pairs in a large, non-university health care system with a widely used, commercially available electronic health record.Methods: We first retrieved medications and problems entered in the electronic health record by clinicians during routine care during a six month study period. Following the previously published approach, we calculated the link frequency and link ratio for each pair then identified a threshold cutoff for estimated problem-medication pair appropriateness through clinician review; problem-medication pairs meeting the threshold were included in the resulting knowledge base. We selected 50 medications and their gold standard indications to compare the resulting knowledge base to the pilot knowledge base developed previously and determine its recall and precision.Results: The resulting knowledge base contained 26,912 pairs, had a recall of 62.3% and a precision of 87.5%, and outperformed the pilot knowledge base containing 11,167 pairs from the previous study, which had a recall of 46.9% and a precision of 83.3%.Conclusions: We validated the crowdsourcing approach for generating a knowledge base of problem-medication pairs in a large non-university health care system with a widely used, commercially available electronic health record, indicating that the approach may be generalizable across health-care settings and clinical systems. Further research is necessary to better evaluate the knowledge, to compare crowdsourcing with other approaches, and to evaluate if incorporating the knowledge into electronic health records improves patient outcomes.Citation: McCoy AB, Wright A, Krousel-Wood M, Thomas EJ, McCoy JA, Sittig DF. Validation of a crowdsourcing methodology for developing a knowledge base of related problem-medication pairs. Appl Clin Inf 2015; 6: 334–344http://dx.doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2015-01-RA-0010


Author(s):  
Lara Khansa ◽  
Jonathan Forcade ◽  
Girivaraprasad Nambari ◽  
Saravanan Parasuraman ◽  
Patrick Cox

With the aging United States population, healthcare costs have considerably increased and are expected to keep rising in the foreseeable future. In this paper, the authors propose an intelligent cloud-based electronic health record (ICEHR) system that has the potential to reduce medical errors and improve patients’ quality of life, in addition to reducing costs and increasing the productivity of healthcare organizations. They developed a set of best practices that encompass end-user policies and regulations, identity and access management, network resilience and service level agreements, advanced computational power, “Big Data” mining abilities, and other operational/managerial controls that are meant to improve the privacy and security of the ICEHR, and make it inherently compliant to healthcare regulations. These best practices serve as a framework that offers a single interconnection agreement between the cloud host and healthcare entities, and streamlines access to private patient information based on a unified set of access principles.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A Harle ◽  
Alyson Listhaus ◽  
Constanza M Covarrubias ◽  
Siegfried OF Schmidt ◽  
Sean Mackey ◽  
...  

Abstract In this case report, the authors describe the implementation of a system for collecting patient-reported outcomes and integrating results in an electronic health record. The objective was to identify lessons learned in overcoming barriers to collecting and integrating patient-reported outcomes in an electronic health record. The authors analyzed qualitative data in 42 documents collected from system development meetings, written feedback from users, and clinical observations with practice staff, providers, and patients. Guided by the Unified Theory on the Adoption and Use of Information Technology, 5 emergent themes were identified. Two barriers emerged: (i) uncertain clinical benefit and (ii) time, work flow, and effort constraints. Three facilitators emerged: (iii) process automation, (iv) usable system interfaces, and (v) collecting patient-reported outcomes for the right patient at the right time. For electronic health record-integrated patient-reported outcomes to succeed as useful clinical tools, system designers must ensure the clinical relevance of the information being collected while minimizing provider, staff, and patient burden.


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