Frequent Mobile Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Users Respond More Quickly to Emergency Department Consultation Requests (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Specialty consultation is a critical aspect of an emergency department (ED) practice, and a delay in providing consultation might have a significant clinical effect and worsen the ED overcrowding. Although mobile electronic medical records (mEMR) are being increasingly utilized and are known to improve the workflow of healthcare providers, limited studies have evaluated its effectiveness in real-life clinical scenarios. OBJECTIVE We aimed to determine the association between response duration to ED specialty consultation request and frequency of mEMR use. METHODS This retrospective study was conducted in an academic ED in Seoul, South Korea. We analyzed EMR and mEMR data from May 2018 to December 2018. Timestamps of ED consultation requests were retrieved from the PC-based EMR, and the response interval was calculated. Doctors’ log frequencies were obtained from the mEMR. We merged both data using doctors’ de-identification numbers. Pearson’s product-moment correlation was performed to identify this association. The primary outcome was the relationship between the frequency of mEMR usage and time interval from ED request to the completion of the consultation by specialty doctors. Secondary outcome was the relationship between the frequency of specialty doctors’ mEMR usage and the response time to consultation requests. RESULTS A total of 25,454 consultations requests were made for 15,555 patients, and 271 specialty doctors provided ED specialty consultations. Of the 742 doctors who used the mEMR, 212 doctors used mEMR in specialty consultation process. According to the mEMR usage pattern, the average usage frequency of all users was 13.3/day, and the average duration of the completion of the specialty consultation was 51.0 min. For 21,885 completed consultations, there was a significant inverse relationship between the frequency of mEMR usage and time interval from ED request to consultation completion by specialty doctors. (Coefficient: -0.19 (-0.32 to -0.06), P<.01) Of 23,692 consultations had response time stamp among inclusions. There was also a significant inverse relationship between the frequency of specialty doctors’ mEMR usage and the response time to consultation requests (coefficient: -0.17 (-0.30 to -0.04), P=.01). CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest that frequent mEMR usage is associated with quicker response time to ED consultation requests.