IT leaders at Houston-based Texas Children's told Becker's that they wish their EHR had more automation abilities to freely schedule appointments and capture patient data.
"It would be great if we could leverage robotic process automation (similar to a chatbot) to schedule appointments versus using a highly complex tool (decision trees) to schedule a patient's appointment via the phone," said Nikki Blaze, director of Epic and clinical solutions. "I'm not speaking about online scheduling (MyChart), but when a patient calls for an appointment."
In March, Epic partnered with Microsoft to use GPT-4 within its EHR offerings. The company will use the artificial intelligence tool to help clinicians investigate data in quicker ways.
"My wish would be that our EHR could automatically detect any system on the network that is capturing patient relevant data," said Associate CIO Teresa Tonthat. "From there, have a seamless way to act as a 'hub and spoke' to securely ingest that powerful data into the respective patient's chart and have it easily consumable by our care team. Interoperability via automation!"
IT leaders at other systems also told Becker's that they want their EHR to automate certain processes to allow clinicians to spend more time with patients.