Making Sense of EMR and Communication Technology Convergence
Top 10 Use Cases to Drive an Effective Epic Mobile Deployment
We repeatedly hear from our clients, “With Healthcare IT vendors, it is often very difficult achieve clarity on where one technology ends and the next one begins.” There are many reasons for this, including the often-confusing boundaries in terms of which product is used for which workflow, and the line between what’s actually available, what’s in development, and what’s conceptual. Regardless of the reason, the negative impacts are clear:
- Delayed project approval and launch due to confusion and perceived risk
- Disjointed end user experience due to poorly executed workflow integration across vendors
- Disconnects between expected and actual project value
The Clinical Communication and Collaboration (CC&C) segment within Healthcare IT is currently experiencing this kind of confusion. On one hand, the past five years of vendor maturity, implementation lessons, and guidance from clients has led to consistent deployment architectures across communication apps (voice/text), clinical alerting, nurse call, and patient monitoring. Epic’s entry into the category with its maturing Secure Chat functionality has brought new levels of opportunity for delivering a successful, sustainable mobile communication experience for the full care team.
PatientSafe’s Epic clients have partnered with us to embrace Epic’s evolving capabilities and avoid functional conflict. Through our collaborative approach, we achieve the following:
- Removal of confusion for clinical end users — everyone across the health system has absolute clarity on how to reach members of the care team
- Creation of a comprehensive set of clinical documentation AND communication tools that successfully move health systems to a “mobile first” model of care delivery
- Strong adoption of Epic’s mobile apps Rover and Haiku
Implementation strategy for our Epic health system partners is driven by three key components:
- Joint validation with the Clinical Informatics team to understand which communication-related functionality within Epic’s toolkit they plan to deploy: Secure Chat, on-call scheduling, Treatment Team assignment, and EMR-initiated alerts/alarms
- Leveraging a well-developed set of communication and alerting use cases (see table below) to assess where workflows will be initiated and what integration points are needed to streamline the user experience
- Deploying the PatientTouch Communication platform with a modular approach, fully complementing and catalyzing adoption of Epic’s mobile tools by turning off any PatientTouch functionality that risks confusion or conflicts with Epic’s capabilities
Through this strong collaboration with our Epic clients, we have developed 10 Core Clinical Use Cases for Epic Health Systems to guide deployments. These use cases fall into four categories that play a major role in overall system design and project execution:
- Role-Based Communication
- Physician Adoption
- Patient Safety
- Assignment Process
The table below provides a brief overview of the key workflows and functional aspects of each use case. Working alongside our customers, the PatientSafe implementation teams break each use case down into its component parts, developing multiple example workflows, integration requirements, and closed-loop end states. Additionally, we document target end-state outcomes of each use case related to efficiency, patient safety, and financial impact.
Top 10 Core Clinical Communication Use Cases for Epic Health Systems
| # | Use Case | Key Workflow Impact |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Role-Based Communication: Voice
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End User Benefit:
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| 2 | Role-Based Communication: Messaging
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End User Benefit:
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| 3 | Physician Adoption: Streamlined On-Call Schedules
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End User Benefit:
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| 4 | Physician Adoption: Protecting Physician Privacy and Preferences
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End User Benefit:
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| 5 | Physician Adoption: Outreach to Community Providers not in Epic
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End User Benefit:
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| 6 | Patient Safety: Role-Based Nurse Call Alerts
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End User Benefit:
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| 7 | Patient Safety: Secondary Alarm Notifications for Patient Monitoring Events
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End User Benefit:
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| 8 | Patient Safety: Audible Triage of Alert Severity
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End User Benefit:
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| 9 | Patient Safety: Team-Based Distribution of Emergent Events, such as Codes
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End User Benefit:
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| 10 | Assignment Process
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End User Benefit:
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By leveraging these use cases to develop vendor requirements and mitigate risk related to system overlap, health systems with Epic EHR will be prepared to successfully deploy the Epic mobile application ecosystem. Without consideration of this full set of use cases, our industry research validates likely project conflicts or adoption gaps including:
- Extended project planning and delayed launch as the needs outlined above are discovered piecemeal and the resulting project scope creep increases project cost and timeframe
- Post-Go Live discovery of significant communication functional gaps, which leads to a delayed “re-start” of the Epic mobile app program to achieve desired adoption rates
- Failed 3rd party general-purpose communication apps — specifically voice-only standalone apps originally designed for enterprise business users — that can manage voice call delivery, but are unstable or incomplete related to alerting, assignment, clinical, and physician needs
If your health system is pursuing an Epic-first mobile strategy, our strong recommendation is to build your mobile program with this full set of use cases in mind. Plan to scale with Epic’s Secure Chat functionality deeply embedded, and well complemented, by nimble CC&C solutions. PatientSafe and our Epic clients have repeatedly validated this path to success. If you would like to learn more about how PatientTouch serves as a perfect companion to the Epic mobile app ecosystem, read about it here or contact us.
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