1. Information exchange gave physicians standard guidelines on diagnosing H1N1. When the country was on alert about H1N1 last fall, Mr. Reese says his hospital was concerned with two issues: the potential severity of the outbreak and the shortage of caregiver masks and vaccines. “Everyone was in a tizzy, so we sat back and said, ‘You know what? Because everything is standardized, I can see what’s going on with a patient in any exam room in the health system. I can see what the doctor’s doing’,” he says. The health system decided to track physician’s diagnostic workups, and the results showed physicians were testing for H1N1 in symptoms who presented flu-like symptoms.
“We made up testing guidelines of care and published them, and instantaneously, they were available to all care sites,” Mr. Reese says. ‘If the physician thought a patient had the flu and they wanted to rule out H1N1, they could look at a checklist to see what they need to test to rule it out.”
2. Shortages of masks, vaccines and providers could be tracked. The availability of supply information throughout the health system allowed Reese to assess where there was a shortage of masks and vaccines. “By looking at the data, we could rebalance the inventory of where things were twice a day,” he says. “Because the care delivery pathways are identical, I could also see where a hospital needed a nurse, and I could float a nurse from one end of town to the other.” Because supplies and procedures were standardized throughout the system and shortages became quickly apparent through the EMR, the health system could make sure “all care delivery sites and all caregivers had the supplies they needed,” according to Mr. Reese.
3. The health system could see how the disease spread through the community. By tracking the number of H1N1 diagnoses recorded in the EMR system, Sentara could see where the outbreaks were occurring and how the flu was spreading from one community to the next. “We could move supplies immediately to the areas where the flu was presenting itself,” Mr. Reese says. The ability to track the spread of the flu meant providers could be distributed as needed to different communities — and the health system could contribute to national data on the spread of the illness. “I could see graphically how [H1N1] moved through the community,” Mr. Reese says. “It allowed us to pull data from the system and immediately report and react to that data.”
4. Physicians could follow up with patients easily after they left the hospital. Although hospitals have had the ability to follow up with patients through phone calls and email for years, the presence of an EMR with a “patient portal” feature means patients can log in from home and read their test results and correspond with their physicians through the secure portal. “With an EMR, you have an electronic handoff to the primary care physician post-discharge to make sure the patient is well managed, and the patient can go home and renew any prescriptions, communicate with the provider and get more information online.” Sentara currently has 33,000 patients on its patient portal, a number that makes a big difference when a health system is dealing with a disease outbreak.
Learn more about Sentara.
