Connected Care: How Phoenix Children’s Optimized Its EHR To Enhance Patient Care

It’s been 17 years since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act enforced the use of electronic health records. While the EHR is commonplace in hospitals across the country, a growing documentation burden shows that there’s still room for optimization that improves both clinician experiences and patient outcomes.

In recent years, Phoenix Children’s pivoted away from an EHR optimization lens focused on the technology itself to an emphasis on clinical optimization for safety, quality and patient outcomes. That initiative demonstrated the need for clinical access to real-time actionable insights. In response, the hospital set up a Microsoft-based data warehouse that pulls from the EHR in one-minute intervals. Microsoft Power BI acts as a data visualization tool to surface insights for clinicians.

Now, Phoenix Children’s clinical team can use the insights to identify concerning trends, patterns or statistics to be addressed. Dr. Wendy Bernatavicius, division chief of primary, complex care and adolescent medicine at Phoenix Children’s, explained that the team has already done this in its effort to remove inaccurate labeling of penicillin allergies in pediatric patients.

Artificial intelligence tools also aid the hospital in predicting early deterioration of those in in-patient care and also no-shows among ambulatory patients.

The health system’s vision for its EHR journey is to conduct large-scale, enterprisewide projects supported by technology.

“We realized that the EMR is simply a tool in our toolkit for clinical transformation, clinical excellence and clinical outcomes,” says Dr. Vinay Vaidya, senior vice president and chief medical information officer at Phoenix Children’s. “It is a means to an end, not an end itself.”

DISCOVER: EHR optimization enables health systems use of data to improve clinical workflows.