G09 – Modifying the Electronic Health Record to Facilitate the Implementation and Evaluation of Interdisciplinary, Integrated Care Workflows for Behavioral Health Concerns

Summary

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been touted as a key facilitator of improved patient care and outcomes. EHRs can help patients receive optimal care by improving communication among health care team members, promoting timely access to information at the point of care, standardizing care processes, and providing clinical decision support. The creation of learning health systems–in which science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation of the EHR–are dependent on our ability to modify EHRs to meet emerging care delivery and quality improvement needs. Despite this, many EHRs are not optimized to support delivery of quality improvement initiatives or interdisciplinary team workflow optimization. Moreover, although many EHRs contain large volumes of patient-level data, poor organization of data fields across multiple windows, duplication, and other issues create information overload for clinicians and hinder the usability and application of data to interdisciplinary team clinical decision making and care delivery, which can result in suboptimal care or patient harm. This presentation a) describes how one integrated health care delivery system modified its EHR to accelerate the implementation and evaluation of an interdisciplinary, integrated care EHR workflow for behavioral health concerns; b) outlines a specific process other health care systems may employ to bring their EHR workflows in alignment with interdisciplinary team goals in support of improved patient care and outcomes generally, or around specific presenting concerns or processes. Topics will include, but are not limited to: a) understanding the varying workflows of the interdisciplinary care team members and how to involve them in the EHR front-end redesign; b) strategies to improve documentation and uptake of the workflow from clinical staff via increasing buy-in and streamlining documentation workflow processes; c) approaches to training and retraining on new EHR processes.