Epic

With firearm injury as one of the leading causes of death among children and teens in the U.S., Northwell Health is taking a proactive approach to gun violence prevention. When patients visit the emergency room, doctors ask routine questions about firearm exposure. If alerted through the screening process, social workers assess patients' situations, offer resources, and provide guidance to address underlying issues. The goal of this initiative is to keep kids safer, reduce harm, and normalize the topic of gun safety. Dr. Chethan Sathya, director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health, asks, “If we’re asking patients and families about substance use, behavioral health issues, exercise, smoking and wellness, then why aren’t we asking about firearm injury risk?” By engaging with patients on this topic, doctors, social workers, and emergency room staff can help lower the overall level of gun violence in communities. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gZKhxxgM #healthcare #healthIT #safety

Nurses at UW Health have been early adopters of generative AI in Epic, using it to automatically draft responses to patient messages. Their hands-on experience with this technology—known as Art, or augmented response technology—has been crucial. "Whether it's telephone calls or MyChart messages, a lot of that interaction is coming through the nurse, so it's just really cool that this is a tool that we can utilize to help with everyday work that we're doing," said Amanda Weber, registered nurse clinical supervisor at UW Health. "We have the option to provide direct feedback on what worked and what didn't work with particular responses that were generated. Any improvements or recommendations that we have, we can input that right then and there." We appreciate you and your close collaboration, UW nurses! Read more about their experiences: https://lnkd.in/gXPayJda #healthcare #healthIT #AI

Our friends at Helsinki University Hospital are the first providers in Finland to implement barcode scanning for medication administration—the leading preventable factor jeopardizing patient safety worldwide. Since using this functionality in Epic, dispensing errors have decreased by 52% and administration errors have decreased by 35%, improving patient safety. Congrats to the folks at HUH! Photo: Helsinki University Hospital medical staff train in the Resuscitation with Angiography Percutaneous Techniques and Operative Repair (RAPTOR) room to treat critically injured patients. Credit: Henri Salonen Read more: https://lnkd.in/gcX_dqDG #healthcare #healthIT #patientsafety

Smile! Our campus donkey, Ralph, is back for his summer stint at Epic. He couldn’t be more excited for his first-day-of-school photo 😊 Good to have you back, buddy. 

Medication nonadherence accounts for about half of treatment failures, 125,000 deaths, and a quarter of hospitalizations annually in the US. Of the nearly 4 billion scripts written in the US each year, it’s estimated that one-fifth of new scripts are never filled. ThedaCare, our fellow Wisconsinites, are taking a few hands-on approaches to improve medication adherence in their community: 1. Creating a retail pharmacy (pictured below!) that offers medications at costs that are similar to or lower than those at outside pharmacies. 2. Delivering outpatient medications directly to patients’ rooms before they’re discharged to ensure they’re filled. 3. Offering both curbside pick-up and mail delivery for medications. Now, 60-90% of ThedaCare’s hospitalized patients fill their prescriptions before discharge. Plus, programs implemented at the retail pharmacy have contributed to millions of dollars in savings that allow ThedaCare to give more back to their community, including by funding the Caring Hearts program that provides one-dollar medications. Great work, folks! Read more: https://lnkd.in/g3aqkK6P #healthcare #healthIT #pharmacy

To improve access to urgent care, Bryan Health began offering 24/7 telehealth appointments to patients across Nebraska through a partnership with KeyCare, a national network of virtual care providers. Bryan has since seen an 8% increase in virtual visits and a 99% patient satisfaction rate for virtual visits. Bryan and KeyCare collaborate through Epic’s Telehealth Anywhere network, which allows partner organizations to provide virtual care and share relevant information through Epic. Patients can request and complete video visits right from their MyChart accounts, and KeyCare providers can access their patients’ relevant clinical information just as it appears to providers at Bryan. When a virtual visit is complete, the documentation flows right into Epic so that Bryan’s providers can follow up with their patients. Congrats, folks! Learn more from Bryan’s CIO, Bridgett Ojeda: https://lnkd.in/g5_R_9hX #healthcare #healthIT #telehealth

The average wait time in the U.S. for patients to see a physician is 26 days, a 24% increase since 2004. Our friends at WakeMed recently showed that two techniques—breaking up old processes and embracing self-scheduling tools—can make quite a difference. All told, their approach has led to an increase of 75,000 visits annually, increasing outpatient revenue by 21%.   WakeMed used Epic analytics to identify the causes of scheduling bottlenecks, finding stringent scheduling processes—like what time of day new patients can be seen—to be a key culprit. While using that data to drive change, WakeMed embraced a better digital experience for patients, using Fast Pass to automatically offer appointments to waitlisted patients and using self-scheduling to help patients book more appointments without straining scheduling staff.   Congrats, folks!   Read more: https://lnkd.in/gcQ_XiWv #healthcare #healthIT #capacity

The surge in telehealth prompted a question for health systems: “How do we ensure that important pre-visit readiness documents—questionnaires and consent forms required for both quality and compliance—get completed without a traditional check-in experience?" Since integrating virtual behavioral health visits with MyChart, Geisinger has seen a 13% increase in patients who use their patient portal, and the organization has saved more than $560,000 to date. Geisinger shifted from launching telehealth visits through links sent to patients’ email addresses to launching visits directly in MyChart, integrating the patient experience with care delivery. "Since go live, 96% of patients completed e-signature of required documents, up from 66% at the start of the pilot,” said Benjamin C. Gonzales, operations manager II, virtual care, behavioral health at Geisinger. “This has made our team's compliance efforts significantly easier to manage...81% of patients completed all components of e-Check In, up from 18% from the start of the pilot. This includes payment of co-pays, health questionnaires, demographic updates and verification of insurance." Congrats, folks! Read more: https://lnkd.in/g8s6wpGi #healthcare #healthIT #behavioralhealth

Just a few weeks ago, we shared that clinicians at UMCG and Elisabeth-TweeSteden Ziekenhuis (ETZ) became the first in the world to use generative AI-powered patient summaries in Epic. As a follow-up, researchers at UMCG and ETZ published a study on the AI-generated summaries, finding them to be comparable to physician-created summaries in terms of completeness, correctness, and trustworthiness. These findings, they write, suggest that AI summaries can be “effective in reducing clinicians’ administrative burden without compromising summary quality.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/gv475zaN #healthcare #healthIT #AI

To help patients and keep schedules full, The MetroHealth System (Cleveland, OH) uses AI in Epic to identify patients at risk of missing upcoming appointments. Staff call each at-risk patient individually to confirm their appointments or offer options to reschedule. While personalized calls take a bit more work than automated outreach, MetroHealth considers the juice worth the squeeze. Among an initial study group, their approach drove a 9.4% decrease in missed appointments, with the most dramatic result being a 15.0% decrease among Black patients. From the article: “Barriers that affect patients’ ability to make it to healthcare appointments, including limited transportation and work or childcare conflicts, are known to affect non-White patients and patients who are younger disproportionately. Efforts to decrease no-shows can make existing disparities worse if they don’t adequately account for these patient populations.” Congrats, everyone! Read more: https://lnkd.in/gaAbuue4 #healthcare #healthIT #AI