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Automate the transmission of ePCR data into their Epic EHR
Made pre-hospital care data available immediately to ED staff and eliminated manual labor of printing and submitting ePCRs at the hospital.
Carilion Clinic is a not-for-profit healthcare organization headquartered in Roanoke, Virginia with seven hospitals and 225 clinics. Carilion serves about 1 million residents in southwest Virginia and utilizes Epic as their electronic health record system.
Carilion Clinic recognized interoperability deficiencies and sought ways to improve the transmission of data between EMS agencies and Emergency Departments. They wanted to reduce the time needed for ePCRs to become available for the ED staff and to increase the accuracy and completeness of their patient care records.
At the time, EMS agencies needed to connect to a printer and generate a paper report to leave at the ED with the patient. The patient report was placed with other paper documents to be scanned into the Chart Review-Media Tab in Epic post-discharge. The report was then boxed and shipped to a third-party scanning service, adding costs and delaying processing.
Technical difficulties in printing led to:
In addition, the HIM group was spending days or weeks following up on errors or missing reports.
And, most important, the ePCR information was not being used during patient’s stay.
Carilion simplified the transmission of ePCR data by leveraging an existing standard for electronic patient exchange. They were already using Direct Secure Messaging for Transitions of Care to providers in the community. It was determined this inherent functionality would be the most efficient way to get records into their EHR.
Many of their high-volume agencies were already using ImageTrend Elite, which is connected by Kno2 leveraging this same standard. Carilion now has immediate access to ePCR data in the patient’s chart through the Epic Care Everywhere solution, enabling real-time treatment decisions by their care teams in the ED.
The solution was there for both entities, it just had to be utilized.
Once the system was in place, Carilion realized a number of significant benefits:
In the first year of use, more than 20,000 EMS reports were received and available in Care Everywhere within Carilion’s Epic system.
Ultimately, we will establish bi-directional exchange with EMS and patient lookup so the paramedic can query Carilion’s Epic system on dispatch, pull the patient’s chart into the system and know what medications they may have been on, allergies or care history.
Walt Fisher
Application Analyst at Carilion
Establishing electronic records from EMS into the hospital EMR was just the first step in Carilion’s plans.
Both Carilion and the EMS agencies have benefited from this standards-based exchange of patient information. By enabling interoperability from EMS to hospitals via ImageTrend and Kno2, Carilion was able to drastically improve the availability of patient care records and matching of patient identification. EMS agencies also benefit from faster turnaround at patient handoff. Most importantly, patient care is positively impacted because information is accessible by the entire care team in the right place and at the right time.
For detailed steps taken by Carilion Clinic to implement these changes, read the full case study.
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