Digitization of Measurement Based Care Pathways in Mental Health through REDCap and Electronic Health Record Integration (Preprint)
BACKGROUND The delivery of standardized self-report assessments is essential for measurement-based care (MBC) in mental health. Paper-based methods of MBC data collection may result in transcription errors, missing data, and other data quality issues when entered into the patient electronic health record (EHR). OBJECTIVE To address these issues, a dedicated instance of REDCap, a free, widely used electronic data capture platform, was established to enable the deployment of digitized self-assessments in clinical care pathways to inform clinical decision making. METHODS REDCap was integrated with the primary clinical information system to facilitate real-time transfer of discrete data and descriptive reports from REDCap into the EHR. Both technical and administrative components were required for complete implementation. A technology acceptance survey was also administered to capture physician and clinician attitudes towards the new system. RESULTS Integration of REDCap with the EHR transitioned clinical workflows from paper-based to electronic data collection. This resulted in significant time-savings, improved data quality and valuable real-time information delivery. Digitization of self-report assessments at each appointment contributed to clinic-wide implementation of the Major Depressive Disorder Integrated Care Pathway (MDD-ICP). This digital transformation facilitated a 4-fold increase in physician adoption of this ICP workflow and a 3-fold increase in patient enrollment resulting in an overall significant increase in MDD-ICP capacity. Physician and Clinician attitudes were overall positive with almost all respondents agreeing that the system was useful to their work. CONCLUSIONS REDCap provided an intuitive patient interface for collection of self-report measures, real-time access to results to inform clinical decisions, and an extensible backend for systems integration. The approach scaled effectively and expanded to high-impact clinics throughout the hospital, allowing for broad deployment of complex workflows and standardized assessments leading to accumulation of harmonized data across clinics and care pathways. REDCap is a flexible tool that can be effectively leveraged to facilitate automatic transfer of self-report data to the EHR. However, thoughtful governance is required to complement the technical implementation to ensure that data standardization, data quality, patient safety, and privacy are maintained.