TECH OUTLOOKSeptember - 20199This is the kind of health issue that we tackle head-on through bringing together our clinical experts across the system to share and collaboratively develop best practices. An OB Focus Group that is part of the PSJH Women & Children's Institute, one of our six clinical institutes that connect providers and experts across our seven-state system, identified maternal hemorrhage as an issue we could move the needle on.Our physician informatists worked with our OB hospitalist partners in our largest Portland, Oregon-area hospital and partnered together with the Epic team of Information Services to build out a pilot program using guidelines set by the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and developing a risk scoring process using our Epic EMR. I personally can remember a time in the not too distance past, where my physician colleagues were using paper checklists and having to make these many complex connections on their own without the seamlessness and prompting Epic allows. The technology does not work without deep understanding of clinical process that supports research-based best practices. Epic provides a framework for workflows we build with our clinical partners, and in turn the technology and the processes work together to ensure the right information is being gathered at every step of obstetric and post-partum care. Risk factors such as such as active bleeding and a history of certain conditions allow Epic to calculate a risk score and flag moms who have a higher likelihood of complications. Then, when our clinicians both within our system and others using the Epic technology in the community encounter those patients, a unique list of orders of tests, medications, and even transfusion products are automatically queued up, making it simple for nurses to proactively take life-saving measures for patients at risk.This approach is a perfect fit for our mission-focused approach to health at Providence St. Joseph Health. As much as I love the power of technologies like Epic, in health care, where large nonprofit systems like ours that are challenged to efficiently offer more care to increasing volumes of patients, we have to have a solid reason for implementing tech. We are focused on technology not for innovation's sake, but for expanding the volume of those we can serve at scale to ensure the healthiest communities possible where we serve. And what better way to bring tech and clinical best practices together than to save moms. Using Epic as a single record that aggregates multiple streams of data gives us a framework to match a patient's history to specific known risk profilesMichael Marino
< Page 8 | Page 10 >