Three physicians outlined the benefits of a recent IT intervention deployed at Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine in an op-ed for The New England Journal of Medicine.
The authors, from University of Pennsylvania and Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, noted "current EHRs are largely digital remakes of traditional systems," such as paper charts. To upgrade these systems for the electronic era, the authors suggested hospitals work to deliver relevant patient data to clinicians "when the information is most actionable."
The authors discussed a customizable dashboard Penn Medicine rolled out to allow physicians to "subscribe" to updates on their patients, similar to how people subscribe to social media updates. The authors developed a web application to pull real-time information from patient charts into a dashboard, which delivered push notifications on time-sensitive aspects of patient care, such as medication expirations.
"Digitizing the chart made clinical data more legible and accessible remotely, but the more transformative change was eliminating the need to be in the chart to know that a task had been overlooked in the first place," the authors wrote. "A second change is that subscription services can shorten the lag time between when information becomes available and when it's used."
To access the op-ed, click here.