Care teams can be quite large and include clinicians inside and outside the facility, flowing in and out of the hospital all day and night. Although the faces may change, they all access the same EHR system with the same generic workflow and general information. They must search to find the relevant information they need to safely deliver care and then move on to the next patient on their rounds.
For example, an overnight RN may start his shift with a patient admitted for a heart condition who appears to be decompensating. He searches the EHR for the hospitalist’s and/or on-call cardiologist’s clinical notes, which were not shared during the patient handoff — but is unable to find that critical information. That means the nurse must start calling or asking around about the right physicians who need to be contacted.
If the EHR were optimized with an embedded application, the first information the nurse would see is those team members’ names, along with the rest of the team for that patient at the bedside. In addition, their clinical notes would be readily accessible. Viewing immediate and accurate contact information for all clinicians saves many cumulative hours each week of searching, calling and waiting for answers. When this critical information is readily accessible within the EHR, clinicians starting their shift have the EHR context that they need to ensure care continuity and enable them to act quickly if an intervention may be needed.
When the EHR information is juxtaposed with the active patient list and action items in a highly intuitive and workflow-focused design, EHRs support workflows rather than disrupting them. Such a list can include real-time updates on patients’ conditions, medications, last rounding information and other relevant data. If the nurse decides that some needed data on that first screen is missing, they can leverage the integrated technologies within the EHR to easily customize it for maximum relevance. This data also can be synchronized between users and across the various modules of the EHRs so all care team members have the same, up-to-date information, which saves time at the point of care and during documentation, and protects patient safety.
Having these capabilities available through an easily integrated application — with no rip and replace — is in stark contrast to traditional EHR customization that is done by the vendor, which could take weeks or months of waiting and countless dollars for the vendor to perform a change order.
