Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

Chief pharmacy informatics officer Pieter Helmons will be talking about St Jansdal's approach at a HIMSS event in Cambridge later this week.

A HIMSS survey recommends that electronic medical records should be just one part of connected medical management initiatives that draw data from multiple systems and devices.

Epic this week sent out an update to its healthcare customers, meant to help providers nationwide detect potential cases of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, or 2019-nCoV. WHY IT MATTERS Epic has standardized the new travel screening questionnaire in an effort to ensure clinicians and other front-line medical staff ask patients about recent international travel. If patients say they have traveled from China, or show symptoms consistent with Wuhan novel coronavirus, providers are now advised to start isolation precautions to help contain potential infection. Epic says this new update was developed in collaboration with biocontainment experts, infectious disease physicians and others with guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Early this week, the Epic Travel and Communicable Disease Advisory Board, which comprises infectious disease clinicians practicing at healthcare organizations using Epic, started discussing updates to the travel screening in Epic to detect possible cases of 2019-nCoV. Members of the advisory board include experts at Providence St. Joseph Health in Washington, which, upon treating the first 2019-nCoV case in the United States, "quickly turned on an electronic prompt for doctors and nurses to ask travel screening questions," as reported by Politico. The board determined that healthcare organizations will automatically get the new coronavirus alert within Epic’s travel screening activity. In addition, Epic says its representatives are reaching out to its provider customers to verify that they have IT workflows that follow CDC guidelines. THE LARGER TREND In 2014, Epic found itself in the middle of a debate related to another public health crisis – the outbreak of the Ebola virus – and to what extent EHR workflows might be related to timely detection and effective response protocols. That September, Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to the emergency department at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, complaining of symptoms consistent with Ebola. Although he told his nurse that he'd recently traveled to Africa, and it was noted in his EHR, that detail wasn't discerned by the physician, who discharged him from the ED. Duncan returned to the hospital four days later with worsening symptoms and only then was he diagnosed as the first Ebola patient in the U.S. Initially, Texas Health Resources sought to explain why that key travel information was missed by noting that, "as designed, the travel history would not automatically appear in the physician's standard workflow." Two days later, however, THR walked back that statement, clarifying that there was "no flaw in the EHR in the way the physician and nursing portions interacted related to this event" and that the patient's travel history "was available to the full care team." At any rate, the case highlighted how technology, the health systems that configure it and the clinicians who use it are all key factors for fast and efficient diagnosis. ON THE RECORD "Rapid response to an outbreak is critical to contain it, get patients the treatment they need, and protect other patients and staff," said James Doyle, Epic's clinical informatics R&D lead, in a statement about the new coronavirus update. He added that Epic is committed to helping ensure its healthcare clients will be "covered by the latest guidelines from the CDC in consultation with leading experts." “Clinicians on our travel advisory board define the standard for the rapid translation of public health outbreak notifications into actionable warnings," added Dr. Chris Alban, a clinical informaticist at Epic. "Organizations using Epic automatically get advisories in their system as soon as they’re created. Health systems can respond quickly with this configuration that’s been vetted by the experts." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.

The executive director of research at the cloud IT giant describes what CIOs and other healthcare leaders should be looking for at the global conference in March.

The chief medical officer and co-founder at patient engagement tech vendor Luma Health provides a view of what provider organizations can expect in the year ahead.

Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals Foundation Trust has contracted IMMJ Systems and SPS to digitise patient healthcare records.

“Just like you use your smart speaker at home, clinicians soon will be able to say ‘Hey Epic’ to quickly get the information they need and take action,” an Epic exec reveals.

A Regenstrief informatics expert will show at HIMSS20 how the Indiana Network for Population Health is evolving as "novel data infrastructure" to address the root conditions for better health.

Dr Afzal Chaudhry, director of digital and CCIO at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, writes about the organisation's eHospital programme.

The company is focused on "infrastructure the Epic community uses today and is likely to use in the future," according to a statement received by CNBC.