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Showing posts with label Electronic Medical Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Electronic Medical Records. Show all posts

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) to go live with patient-empowered EMR

 https://www.canhealth.com/2022/05/04/hhs-to-go-live-with-patient-empowered-emr/

HHS to go live with patient-empowered EMR
May 4, 2022


Filomena Canci

HAMILTON, Ont. – In June, Hamilton Health Sciences is introducing its new Epic hospital information system. The electronic solution will make patient records available to clinicians in a centralized location, reducing the need to call up different applications. Moreover, patients will have access to their medical information – including test results, lab results and much more – through the Epic MyChart app.
“Our Vision is to provide ‘Best Care for All’,” says Filomena Canci (pictured), HHS’ chief nursing information officer and one of the leaders working to bring Epic to the hospital. “Not only will Epic improve clinical care delivery and enhance patient experience, it will also help us innovate and remain at the forefront of health care in Canada.”
Epic replaces the current health information system, made up of multiple electronic and paper-based systems containing different parts of a patient’s record. It can be difficult for hospital staff, doctors and other healthcare providers to pull together full patient records with the current system.
Using the Epic MyChart app, patients will also be able to read discharge summaries and consultation notes as well as an after-visit summary document which notes medication changes, orders placed during their hospital visit and any instructions or education provided during their visit.
Patients can share records with their doctors and caregivers, enter their own health information within a secure personal health record space, access health education materials and securely communicate with healthcare providers.
Other features include virtual visits through video conferencing and the ability to upload pictures of, for example, a rash or wound, to help with assessing and monitoring care.
Additional feature of HHS’s Epic MyChart app:

  • eCheck-in: This allows patients to update information such as an address or contact info, medications, allergies, health coverage, and complete questionnaires prior to their HHS appointment. The purpose is to shorten the length of time a patient is at registration.
  • Video Visits: Scheduled video visits with doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals already take place across HHS – MyChart will make it even easier, with all the info and access in one place, no other online tools required.
  • Notes and Results: Patients can view test results and medical notes from their healthcare team. See your medications, test results, lab results and medical notes. Test and lab results include CT scans, MRIs, x-rays, ultrasounds, echocardiograms, pathology results and lab results such as blood work and COVID testing.
  • Questionnaires: Patients can complete questionnaires within MyChart. These questionnaires could be attached to eCheck-in for certain visits or sent in messages from the care team to patients.
  • Patient-Entered Flowsheets: With these forms, patients can enter medical data, like a blood pressure or blood sugar. The data can be trended over time and can be included in their chart. Abnormal readings can also trigger a message to the healthcare provider to follow-up with the patient.
  • Billing Summary and Details: Patients can pay outstanding balances via MyChart and see details of previously paid bills.
Also available for patients of some clinics:
  • Direct Scheduling: This allows certain clinic patients to schedule appointments with a healthcare provider they already have a relationship with.
  • Appointment Requests: Certain clinic patients can send appointment request messages to healthcare providers they already have an existing relationship with. They can explain why they want an appointment and their preferred availability.
  • Direct Messaging: This lets certain clinic patients send messages to their healthcare providers regarding their medical care or test results. Patients must already have a pre-existing relationship with the person they are messaging in order to reach out this way. Patients will also be able to message about issues not directly related to their medical issue such as billing queries, compliments, complaints and web issues.
With Epic, healthcare providers will understand where a patient has been, and where they’re going in their care journey.
HHS’ current hospital information system is comprised of multiple systems, all containing different parts of a patient’s record. One of the biggest advantages of Epic is its promise of “one patient, one record”, which means that, no matter where a patient is in the hospital, staff and providers will be able to view their full medical history in one unified system. Patients will also be able to update parts of their health record on their own (like medications and allergies) using an app called MyChart.
With Epic, patients won’t have to worry about remembering every detail of their medical history, and providers and staff will be able to make more informed decisions about their care. Using one system across HHS will also dramatically reduce the amount of time providers and staff spend searching for information, enabling them to spend more time listening to patients’ concerns and providing care.
In addition to centralizing most patient records, a major benefit to clinicians seeking information about their patients, the Epic solution will also provide other advantages for healthcare professionals:
Medical professionals are notorious for having hard-to-read handwriting, which can infrequently lead to misunderstandings and errors. For example, misreading a note in a patient’s chart might lead to a wrong dosage of medication.
With Epic, staff and providers will use mobile phones, tables and workstations-on-wheels to update patient information electronically, significantly reducing the chance for errors and patient harm.
A challenge for many patients occurs when they leave the hospital and return to their primary care physician or another external health care provider for care. External providers often need access to a patient’s record to continue providing care, and requesting this information from the hospital can cause unnecessary delays or put pressure on the patient to keep track of everything on their own.
An application called EpicCare Link will make it possible for select external organizations to securely access a patient’s chart, schedule appointments, place orders, communicate with the patient’s hospital care team, and more. This will enable better communication and more effective collaboration between care teams within and outside HHS, improving the patient experience overall.
Over the course of the pandemic, virtual care – including medical appointments by phone or video conferencing – increased by 1,500 per cent at HHS, and it’s unlikely that demand will decrease in the future. Virtual care offers a convenient, accessible alternative for appointments that do not require patients to visit the hospital, and it will be part of HHS’ Epic system.
Staying connected to patients using Epic’s virtual care tools has been shown to reduce unplanned emergency department visits and admissions because providers and staff can proactively monitor patients’ symptoms, medications and progress remotely, and check in using secure messaging and video calls. Post go-live, HHS will explore additional features within MyChart that patients can use to send messages and photos to their care team when they have questions or concerns.
Work is well underway to transform HHS into an Epic hospital in June 2022, and providers, staff and patients all have a role to play. Stay up to date by visiting the Project Odyssey page of HHS.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

eHealth Ontario Watch how access to diagnostic images and reports benefits health care providers and their patients

Digital Health Success Stories
With the recent launch of the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) Common Service, health care providers can now view diagnostic images and reports performed at facilities across the province, in one place.  In August, the service was made available to all authorized users in the Greater Toronto Area as well as in northern and eastern Ontario through the ConnectingOntario ClinicalViewer.  It’s also now available at two hospital organizations in south west Ontario, providing additional patient data to ClinicalConnect users who currently see reports and images and produced within their own region, and is being rolled out to more sites in the coming months. Thanks to this integration, health care providers can now obtain a more complete picture of their patient’s health, regardless of their location.

 
Watch the video above to see how health care providers like Dr. Koff benefit by having quick access to their patients’ diagnostic images and reports. This helps to eliminate the need for patients to carry around CD’s containing their DI information to specialist’s offices. It also eliminates the need to mail or fax test results, and the costly duplication of scans. Most importantly for patients, this network allows specialists at one facility to access images performed at other locations, allowing for more informed, timely medical decisions.

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Help others see firsthand how our work today is enhancing delivery of patient care in Ontario. Our mission is to foster an electronic health care system that puts the patient first, by leveraging existing systems and building new ones to connect health care providers with their patients' medical information.
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Friday, September 1, 2017

NIH’s All of Us Research Issues Initial Research Protocol

NIH’s All of Us Research Issues Initial Research Protocol

August 8, 2017
by Heather Landi
The National Institute of Health’s All of Us Research Program, previously called the Precision Medicine Initiative, released its initial research protocol, or research plan.
The All of Us Research Program’s 61-page protocol includes information on consent forms, the ethical issues associated with the project and explanations for how participants will be able to provide secure access to their electronic health records (EHRs).

The goal of the All of Us Research Program is to gather health-related information from one million or more diverse participants to detect association between genetic and environmental exposures and a wide variety of health outcomes.

The NIH states that longitudinal tracking of health outcomes through EHRs is an important component of the program. Through a consenting process, participants will be asked to authorize linkage of their EHR information. EHR data may be sent directly by the participant’s health care providers to the DRC or sent by the participant to the program through Sync for Science.

Access to EHR data will be repeated regularly throughout the life of the program. The initial data types to be included are demographics, visits, diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory tests, and vital signs, but may be expanded to all parts of the EHR, including health care provider notes. The feed may include mental health data, HIV status, substance abuse and alcohol data, and genomic information stored in the EHR

Participants may need to complete and sign a separate informed consent module to authorize access to their complete EHRs.

“We will create an informatics infrastructure to clean and standardize data from disparate EHR systems across the United States; this broadly applicable system will be a key contribution of the All of Us Research Program to health informatics research efforts nationwide. For participants enrolled by their health care provider organization, the site will extract data from the participant’s EHR, format it according to the DRC’s data model (based on the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership [OMOP] Common Data Model version 5, and transfer it to the DRC using secure protocols,” NIH stated in a press release.
And, the NIH states that although obtaining EHR data from direct volunteers presents unique challenges, early pilot studies have demonstrated feasibility of such an approach. “For example, the Sync for Science (S4S) project launched by NIH and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is creating a technology that aims to make it easy and safe for people to securely share their EHR data for research. S4S has been adopted by the All of Us Research Program and initially will be enabled in a small pilot for DV participants at S4S-enabled direct volunteer sites,” the NIH states.

All of Us Research Program direct volunteer participants who have enrolled at one of these pilot sites will be able to sign into their healthcare provider’s patient portal using the S4S workflow and authorize sharing their EHR data with the program. Their health care provider’s system will provide a secure application program interface (API), which is used by the research program, rather than the provider sending out data, and transmitted to the Us of All Research program.

And, NIH notes that this is just the first version of its protocol. In future versions, NIH intends to include plans to pilot test wearable devices for real-time data collection.
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Friday, February 24, 2017

The myUHN Patient Portal - Infoway Award Winner


The myUHN patient portal has won a second place award from a Canada Health Infoway contest. Here is the presentation they gave:
 http://imaginenationchallenge.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/myUHN-Patient-Portal.pdf

Their infographic on the uptake of the portal is very impressive by the numbers - numbers which have been suggested as viable in research on patient portals (They didn't mention concern for the security of personal health information):
 http://www.uhn.ca/corporate/News/Documents/myUHN_infographic.pdf

The pilot study is over and a full launch began January 30, 2017. It is expected that 250,000 patients will register for it in 2017! Very, very interesting that the portal is integrated into all stages of the clinical experience and by all personnel.

Based on my research on patient portals this looks to be the very promising. Sunnybrook Hospital myChart was also a great pioneer in this area and they have taken a page from their book. It also appears to be an ideal integration solution that I think would work best for a healthcare system.

But what about primary care? Is there an API for that? And why are family docs still so worried about liability or whatever for using a PHR?

Looking closer at myUHN it is very much just a portal or window on the hospital EHR, with a limited but very useful and important set of interaction tools. It is not a personal health record where one can self-report and journal one's health, as is the one developed by McMaster Family Medicine, now called KindredPHR.

If I get sick, I am going to Toronto and the UHN:
 http://www.uhn.ca/PatientsFamilies/myUHN







Thursday, June 16, 2016

eHealth Ontario Innovation Lab at Mohawk College


Innovation Lab Pilot Now Live

We have recently launched an Innovation Lab – in partnership with Mohawk College – where over 100 early adopters from educational institutions, health care organizations, and private sector companies across the country are testing and refining solutions to help transform patient care in a virtual electronic health record (EHR) environment.
Available in its initial form at innovation-lab.ca, this free online service gives access to a data set that simulates the provincial client registry – the repository which uniquely identifies patients based on demographic information and links them to medical records such as lab results or hospital discharge summaries. The lab also provides a moderated forum for discussions. Patient names and data used are fabricated to safeguard privacy and confidentiality.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to offer IT solution developers and vendors open access to a virtual EHR testing environment,” says Peter Bascom, Chief Architect, eHealth Ontario. 
“The lab encourages experimentation with eHealth Ontario products by demonstrating interoperability with provincial EHR assets. It will create the opportunity for more companies to enter the digital health market and it will help vendors who want to respond to procurement proposals to better understand the risks and costs associated with EHR asset integration.”
Interested in becoming an early adopter? Go to innovation-lab.ca, provide some basic information through registration, and begin testing.
The lab will be rolled out more broadly this fall with more EHR data and services as well as lessons learned from our early adopters.