| Title | Bridging the integration gap between patient-generated blood glucose data and electronic health records. |
| Authors | Lewinski, AA; Drake, C; Shaw, RJ; Jackson, GL; Bosworth, HB; Oakes, M; Gonzales, S; Jelesoff, NE; Crowley, MJ |
| Journal | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA |
| Publication Date | 1 Jul 2019 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 14 Jun 2019 |
| Abstract | Telemedicine can facilitate population health management by extending the reach of providers to efficiently care for high-risk, high-utilization populations. However, for telemedicine to be maximally useful, data collected using telemedicine technologies must be reliable and readily available to healthcare providers. To address current gaps in integration of patient-generated health data into the electronic health record (EHR), we examined 2 patient-facing platforms, Epic MyChart and Apple HealthKit, both of which facilitated the uploading of blood glucose data into the EHR as part of a diabetes telemedicine intervention. All patients were offered use of the MyChart platform; we subsequently invited a purposive sample of patients who used the MyChart platform effectively (n = 5) to also use the Apple HealthKit platform. Patients reported both platforms helped with diabetes self-management, and providers appreciated the convenience of the processes for obtaining patient data. Providers stated that the EHR data presentation format for Apple HealthKit was challenging to interpret; however, they also valued the greater perceived accuracy the Apple HealthKit data. Our findings indicate that patient-facing platforms can feasibly facilitate transmission of patient-generated health data into the EHR and support telemedicine-based care. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz039 |
| Title | Implementing Telemedicine in Primary Care: Learning Lessons From Electronic Health Records. |
| Authors | Sinsky, CA |
| Journal | Mayo Clinic proceedings |
| Publication Date | 1 Sep 2020 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 31 Aug 2020 |
| Abstract | |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2020.07.017 |
| Title | eHealth 2015 Special Issue: Impact of Electronic Health Records on the Completeness of Clinical Documentation Generated during Diabetic Retinopathy Consultations. |
| Authors | Mitsch, C; Huber, P; Kriechbaum, K; Scholda, C; Duftschmid, G; Wrba, T; Schmidt-Erfurth, U |
| Journal | Applied clinical informatics |
| Publication Date | 1 Dec 2015 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 9 Oct 2015 |
| Abstract | Two years ago, the Diabetic Retinopathy (DRP) and Traumatology clinic of the Department of Ophthalmology and Optometrics at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria switched from paper-based to electronic health records. A customized electronic health record system (EHR-S) was implemented. To assess the completeness of information documented electronically compared with manually during patient visits. The Preferred Practice Pattern for Diabetic Retinopathy published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology was distilled into a list of medical features grouped into categories to be assessed and documented during the management of patients with DRP. The last seventy paper-based records and all electronic records generated since the switch were analyzed and graded for the presence of features on the list and the resulting scores compared. In all categories, clinical documentation was more complete in the EHR group. In our setting, the implementation of an EHR-S showed a statistically significant positive impact on documentation completeness. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2014-11-RA-0104 |
| Title | eHealth and Clinical Documentation Systems. |
| Authors | Knaup, P; Benning, NH; Seitz, MW; Eisenmann, U |
| Journal | Studies in health technology and informatics |
| Publication Date | 25 Sep 2020 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 30 Sep 2020 |
| Abstract | eHealth is the use of modern information and communication technology (ICT) for trans-institutional healthcare purposes. Important subtopics of eHealth are health data sharing and telemedicine. Most of the clinical documentation to be shared is collected in patient records to support patient care. More sophisticated approaches to electronic patient records are trans-institutional or (inter-)national. Other aims for clinical documentation are quality management, reimbursement, legal issues, and medical research. Basic prerequisite for eHealth is interoperability, which can be divided into technical, semantic and process interoperability. There is a variety of international standards to support interoperability. Telemedicine is a subtopic of eHealth, which bridges spatial distance by using ICT for medical (inter-)actions. We distinguish telemedicine among healthcare professionals and telemedicine between health care professionals and patients. Both have a great potential to face the challenges of aging societies, the increasing number of chronically ill patients, multimorbidity and low number of physicians in remote areas. With ongoing digitalization more and more data are available digitally. Clinical documentation is an important source for big data analysis and artificial intelligence. The patient has an important role: Telemonitoring, wearable technologies, and smart home devices provide digital health data from daily life. These are high-quality data which can be used for medical decisions. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI200676 |
| Title | Electronic health, telemedicine, and new paradigms for training and care. |
| Authors | Todd, CS; Mills, SJ; Innes, AL |
| Journal | Current opinion in HIV and AIDS |
| Publication Date | 1 Sep 2017 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 27 Jun 2017 |
| Abstract | HIV prevention and care is changing rapidly; guideline revisions and programmatic scale-up require innovative approaches to in-service training and care extension to improve provider practice and care access. We assessed recent (≤12 months) peer-reviewed publications on electronic health (eHealth), telemedicine, and other innovative provider-targeted interventions for HIV-related care. Key developments included systems merging electronic medical records (EMR) with provider clinical decision aids to prompt action, demonstration eHealth, and telemedicine projects, reviews or descriptions of technology to improve connectivity in lower resource settings, and a few trials on provider-centered interventions. Most publications were program reports and few data were available regarding efficacy of eHealth interventions for providers on patient HIV-related outcomes, notably identification and management of antiretroviral treatment failure in Kenya. Better evidence is needed for strategies to train providers and care extenders with the goal to improve impact of HIV prevention and care interventions. Rapid technology introduction and expansion may change the paradigm for improving provider knowledge and practice. Although new, the developments are promising for HIV provider-targeted eHealth and innovations for traditional training. More rigorous testing with randomized trials is needed to demonstrate impact on services for people living with HIV. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1097/COH.0000000000000402 |
| Title | Inpatient-outpatient shared electronic health records: telemedicine and laboratory follow-up after hospital discharge. |
| Authors | Reed, M; Huang, J; Brand, R; Graetz, I; Jaffe, MG; Ballard, D; Neugebauer, R; Fireman, B; Hsu, J |
| Journal | The American journal of managed care |
| Publication Date | 1 Oct 2020 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 24 Oct 2020 |
| Abstract | Continuity of patient information across settings can improve transitions after hospital discharge, but outpatient clinicians often have limited access to complete information from recent hospitalizations. We examined whether providers' timely access to clinical information through shared inpatient-outpatient electronic health records (EHRs) was associated with follow-up visits, return emergency department (ED) visits, or readmissions after hospital discharge in patients with diabetes. Stepped-wedge observational study. As an integrated delivery system staggered implementation of a shared inpatient-outpatient EHR, we studied 241,510 hospital discharges in patients with diabetes (2005-2011), examining rates of outpatient follow-up office visits, telemedicine (phone visits and asynchronous secure messages), laboratory tests, and return ED visits or readmissions (as adverse events). We used multivariate logistic regression adjusting for time trends, patient characteristics, and medical center and accounting for patient clustering to calculate adjusted follow-up rates. For patients with diabetes, provider use of a shared inpatient-outpatient EHR was associated with a statistically significant shift toward follow-up delivered through a combination of telemedicine and outpatient laboratory tests, without a traditional in-person visit (from 22.9% with an outpatient-only EHR to 27.0% with a shared inpatient-outpatient EHR; P < .05). We found no statistically significant differences in 30-day return ED visits (odds ratio, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.96-1.09) or readmissions (odds ratio, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.91-1.06) with the shared EHR compared with the outpatient-only EHR. Real-time clinical information availability during transitions between health care settings, along with robust telemedicine access, may shift the method of care delivery without adversely affecting patient health outcomes. Efforts to expand interoperability and information exchange may support follow-up care efficiency. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2020.88506 |
| Title | Utilizing patient geographic information system data to plan telemedicine service locations. |
| Authors | Soares, N; Dewalle, J; Marsh, B |
| Journal | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA |
| Publication Date | 1 Sep 2017 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 25 Mar 2017 |
| Abstract | To understand potential utilization of clinical services at a rural integrated health care system by generating optimal groups of telemedicine locations from electronic health record (EHR) data using geographic information systems (GISs). This retrospective study extracted nonidentifiable grouped data of patients over a 2-year period from the EHR, including geomasked locations. Spatially optimal groupings were created using available telemedicine sites by calculating patients' average travel distance (ATD) to the closest clinic site. A total of 4027 visits by 2049 unique patients were analyzed. The best travel distances for site groupings of 3, 4, 5, or 6 site locations were ranked based on increasing ATD. Each one-site increase in the number of available telemedicine sites decreased minimum ATD by about 8%. For a given group size, the best groupings were very similar in minimum travel distance. There were significant differences in predicted patient load imbalance between otherwise similar groupings. A majority of the best site groupings used the same small number of sites, and urban sites were heavily used. With EHR geospatial data at an individual patient level, we can model potential telemedicine sites for specialty access in a rural geographic area. Relatively few sites could serve most of the population. Direct access to patient GIS data from an EHR provides direct knowledge of the client base compared to methods that allocate aggregated data. Geospatial data and methods can assist health care location planning, generating data about load, load balance, and spatial accessibility. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocx011 |
| Title | Measuring electronic communication networks in virtual care teams using electronic health records access-log data. |
| Authors | Zhu, X; Tu, SP; Sewell, D; Yao, NA; Mishra, V; Dow, A; Banas, C |
| Journal | International journal of medical informatics |
| Publication Date | 1 Aug 2019 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 5 Jun 2019 |
| Abstract | To develop methods for measuring electronic communication networks in virtual care teams using electronic health records (EHR) access-log data. For a convenient sample of 100 surgical colorectal cancer patients, we used time-stamped EHR access-log data extracted from an academic medical center's EHR system to construct communication networks among healthcare professionals (HCPs) in each patient's virtual care team. We measured communication linkages between HCPs using the inverse of the average time between access events in which the source HCPs sent information to and the destination HCPs retrieved information from the EHR system. Social network analysis was used to examine and visualize communication network structures, identify principal care teams, and detect meaningful structural differences across networks. We conducted a non-parametric multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to test the association between care teams' communication network structures and patients' cancer stage and site. The 100 communication networks showed substantial variations in size and structures. Principal care teams, the subset of HCPs who formed the core of the communication networks, had higher proportions of nurses, physicians, and pharmacists and a lower proportion of laboratory medical technologists than the overall networks. The distributions of conditional uniform graph quantiles suggested that our network-construction technique captured meaningful underlying structures that were different from random unstructured networks. MANOVA results found that the networks' topologies were associated with patients' cancer stage and site. This study demonstrates that it is feasible to use EHR access-log data to measure and examine communication networks in virtual care teams. The proposed methods captured salient communication patterns in care teams that were associated with patients' clinical differences. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2019.05.012 |
| Title | Electronic health records implementation in Morocco: Challenges of silo efforts and recommendations for improvements. |
| Authors | Parks, R; Wigand, RT; Othmani, MB; Serhier, Z; Bouhaddou, O |
| Journal | International journal of medical informatics |
| Publication Date | 1 Sep 2019 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 25 Aug 2019 |
| Abstract | Electronic Health Records (EHRs) interventions hold the promise for enabling better healthcare. However, the implementation of EHR systems has been scarce in developing countries. The objective of this study is to investigate the state of EHRs implementation in Morocco; and draw insights for potential improvements. University Medical Centers, known by locals in French as Centres Hospitalier Universitaires (CHU), are the largest and most advanced public healthcare centers in Morocco. A two-phase qualitative study was conducted in four out of the five CHUs. Phase One involved data collection through semi-structured interviews with 27 clinician champions, administrators, and medical directors. Phase Two included a brainstorming session during a health informatics conference held in Fes, Morocco. The data were analyzed using inductive analysis. We identified five main categories of challenges due to silo strategies: (1) EHRs selection and weak bargaining power, (2) identical errors repeated across silos, (3) a lack of interoperability standards, (4) insufficient human and financial, and (5) missed cooperation and collaboration opportunities. While identifying these silo challenges is an important milestone, proposing guidelines to address these challenges can bring Morocco and similar developing countries a step closer to improving healthcare through the use of health informatics and EHRs. Our recommendations for public healthcare organizations are threefold: (1) recognize the power of partnerships among all CHUs, (2) establish an e-health framework, and (3) seek national and international collaborations to drive and shape the eHealth agenda. Furthermore, we align our recommendations with the World Health Organization toolkit for an eHealth strategy to further benefit developing countries. This study identifies the challenges faced by the Moroccan EHRs implementation silo-ed strategy, and it proposes practical and fundamental guidelines to address these challenges and develop an interoperable and sustainable national eHealth system in Morocco and similar developing countries. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2019.05.026 |
| Title | Practice-Level Variation in Telemedicine Use in a Pediatric Primary Care Network During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Retrospective Analysis and Survey Study. |
| Authors | Schweiberger, K; Hoberman, A; Iagnemma, J; Schoemer, P; Squire, J; Taormina, J; Wolfson, D; Ray, KN |
| Journal | Journal of medical Internet research |
| Publication Date | 18 Dec 2020 |
| Date Added to PubMed | 9 Dec 2020 |
| Abstract | Telehealth, the delivery of health care through telecommunication technology, has potential to address multiple health system concerns. Despite this potential, only 15% of pediatric primary care clinicians reported using telemedicine as of 2016, with the majority identifying inadequate payment for these services as the largest barrier to their adoption. The COVID-19 pandemic led to rapid changes in payment and regulations surrounding telehealth, enabling its integration into primary care pediatrics. Due to limited use of telemedicine in primary care pediatrics prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, much is unknown about the role of telemedicine in pediatric primary care. To address this gap in knowledge, we examined the association between practice-level telemedicine use within a large pediatric primary care network and practice characteristics, telemedicine visit diagnoses, in-person visit volumes, child-level variations in telemedicine use, and clinician attitudes toward telemedicine. We analyzed electronic health record data from 45 primary care practices and administered a clinician survey to practice clinicians. Practices were stratified into tertiles based on rates of telemedicine use (low, intermediate, high) per 1000 patients per week during a two-week period (April 19 to May 2, 2020). By practice tertile, we compared (1) practice characteristics, (2) telemedicine visit diagnoses, (3) rates of in-person visits to the office, urgent care, and the emergency department, (4) child-level variation in telemedicine use, and (5) clinician attitudes toward telemedicine across these practices. Across pediatric primary care practices, telemedicine visit rates ranged from 5 to 23 telemedicine visits per 1000 patients per week. Across all tertiles, the most frequent telemedicine visit diagnoses were mental health (28%-36% of visits) and dermatologic (15%-28%). Compared to low telemedicine use practices, high telemedicine use practices had fewer in-person office visits (10 vs 16 visits per 1000 patients per week, P=.005) but more total encounters overall (in-office and telemedicine: 28 vs 22 visits per 1000 patients per week, P=.006). Telemedicine use varied with child age, race and ethnicity, and recent preventive care; however, no significant interactions existed between these characteristics and practice-level telemedicine use. Finally, clinician attitudes regarding the usability and impact of telemedicine did not vary significantly across tertiles. Across a network of pediatric practices, we identified significant practice-level variation in telemedicine use, with increased use associated with more varied telemedicine diagnoses, fewer in-person office visits, and increased overall primary care encounter volume. Thus, in the context of the pandemic, when underutilization of primary care was prevalent, higher practice-level telemedicine use supported pediatric primary care encounter volume closer to usual rates. Child-level telemedicine use differed by child age, race and ethnicity, and recent preventive care, building upon prior concerns about differences in access to telemedicine. However, increased practice-level use of telemedicine services was not associated with reduced or increased differences in use, suggesting that further work is needed to promote equitable access to primary care telemedicine. |
| Link | http://doi.org/10.2196/24345 |