Sonal S Munsiff, Colleen Burgoyne, Erica Dobson, Alexandra Yamshchikov

Making the EHR work for you - Modifications of an Electronic Health Record System to Improve Tracking and Management of Patients Receiving Outpatient Parenteral Antibiotic Therapy

  • Infectious Diseases
  • Oncology
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

Abstract Background Managing the complex needs of Outpatient Parenteral Antibiotic therapy (OPAT) patients is challenging and time-consuming. We describe development of multimodal interventions to facilitate patient management within an Epic® (Epic Systems Corporation) based electronic health record (EHR) platform. Methods During 2016-2018, a multidisciplinary team created several modifications in our local EHR to improve gaps in OPAT care, including shared note templates, shared patient lists, automatically triggered notifications, and comprehensive order sets. A SmartForm was created, allowing collection of discrete, self-contained extractable data about each OPAT episode. We reviewed OPAT episodes from January 2019 through December 2022. Results The multimodal EHR interventions culminated in the creation of a patient report, the “OPAT Monitoring View” collating OPAT relevant data from multiple sections of the chart onto one screen display. This view is accessible both within the patient chart and from multiple list-based, in-basket, and snapshot-anchored preview functions in the EHR. Implementation of the EHR bundle facilitated management of 3,402 OPAT episodes from 2019 to 2022 (850 episodes/year), about 50% higher than anticipated based on 540 OPAT courses in 2016. The OPAT EHR bundle allowed efficient (< 3 hours) multidisciplinary rounds for management of 130-145 patients each week, streamlining of care transitions, and increasing staff satisfaction. Conclusions Bundled multimodal modifications to the local EHR increased patient care efficiency, staff satisfaction, and facilitated data collection to support a large OPAT program. These modifications apply commonly available EHR functionalities to OPAT care and could be adapted to other settings with different EHR platforms.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive