A California children's hospital adopted a note-writing platform from Epic, helping reduce the length of clinical notes and saving providers time.
San Diego-based Rady Children's Hospital developed a "disappearing help line" program in its EHR to tackle "note bloat," or the increase in the number of words in clinical notes, according to an Aug. 12 Epic article. The software provides in-line reminders, suggestions and tips as a provider is drafting a note that disappear once it's signed.
The platform helped cut the length of inpatient progress notes by 18.7% and admission notes by 6.4%, while decreasing the number of coding queries — where coders have to ask more about the visit to bill patients properly — by 14%, Rady Children's researchers found.
Clinicians and health informaticists at Rady Children's developed the help text, according to the article. For instance, one reminder alerts clinicians to only include lab results from the past 24 hours to leave out older results that are no longer relevant, while another links providers to supplemental documentation that might be needed for a certain note type.