AHRQ’s https://www.ahrq.gov report Improving Healthcare Through AHRQ’s Digital Healthcare Research Program contains articles on emerging research related to digital healthcare.
One of the emerging research stories in the report, titled” Creating a HIE Application to Provide Fast Access to Patient Data in ED Settings” shows how integrating HIE data directly into EHRs has the potential to improve the delivery of care and improve patient outcomes as well as increase clinician satisfaction.
Titus Schleyer, D.M.D, Ph.D Principal Investigator for the Research, received funding from AHRQ for $1,143,378 to create a tool so that providers have the important information on a patient’s health history especially in the ED setting where time really matters.
Patient health data is often stored across multiple healthcare systems. In order to improve healthcare during an acute incident it is important to have access to information on a patient that may not be documented in their ED medical record.
Therefore, integrating data into the clinician’s EHR has the potential to decrease repeated or unnecessary diagnostic tests and to expedite care and treatment in potentially life or death situations.
Currently HIE functionality is often difficult to access from a provider’s standpoint may require eternal navigation outside of the ED’s EHR system. To address this challenge, Dr. Schleyer and the team at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis are developing and evaluating a novel applications called Health Dart that will be implemented and tested in 14 EDs.
This application will seamlessly be able to integrate highly relevant information from the HIE directly into the EHR in the ED. The Health Dart application uses the HL7 FHIR standard which allowed researchers to retrieve data from the HIE and display it in the ED’s EHR.
The researchers believe that this study will show that the Health Dart application can improve ED care delivery, patient outcomes, as well as provider efficiency, satisfaction, and further the use of the HIE.
Go to https://digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/page/ahrq-dhr-annual-report-2021.pdf for the report “Improving Healthcare Through AHRQ’s Digital Healthcare Research Program”.