By Joseph Cacchione, MD, FACC
Executive Vice President, Clinical & Network Services, Ascension
The physicians and caregivers who live out Ascension’s healing Mission every day, do it for one reason – they are committed to improving care for those we serve and to making individuals and communities healthier.
Unfortunately, technology created to improve our ability to deliver excellent care frequently creates barriers in our ability to do just that. As the information age has accelerated, technology has made work easier for just about every other industry. But in healthcare, technology has made many aspects of providing care to our patients more difficult.
This is especially true with the electronic health records (EHR) systems that hold our patient data. Too often, clinical information is buried in siloed records that are scattered across hospitals, clinics, urgent care centers, pharmacies, physician offices and labs, making it difficult for physicians and caregivers to deliver coordinated and precise care. When the information is finally retrieved, it is usually poorly organized and fragmented. Most clinicians work in an environment where data is incomplete, inaccessible and delivered in disjointed bursts of information without context.
Seeing a significant opportunity to improve patient safety and quality of care, Ascension is collaborating with Google to make health records more useful, accessible and searchable by pulling them into a single, easy-to-use interface for our clinicians. At the heart of our work is an effort to bring together an integrated view of records from different hospitals and clinics within the Ascension network of care sites and healthcare providers, including the patient’s historical diagnoses, laboratory tests, medications, treatments and progress notes.
This is especially critical as patients are living longer and have more complex health concerns than in the past. Patients with multiple chronic health conditions often require care by several providers at different locations, and it is important for a care team to take all aspects of a patient’s health history into consideration when delivering care. This includes understanding previous treatments, any medications that a patient is currently taking, any medication allergies or potentially harmful combinations, and any current conditions that may be incompatible with a proposed treatment plan.
To be clear: We don’t let today’s technology limitations compromise the care we provide. We do whatever extra work is required to find the information we need. And that takes time – time away from our patients. In fact, it’s estimated that for every hour spent with a patient, U.S. caregivers spend two more hours searching for information related to that patient and documenting the visit in the EHR.
It’s hard to understand why I can instantly find out which player was the leading scorer in last night’s NBA game or check the five-day weather forecast for any city in the nation – but it remains difficult for me, as a provider, to extract critical information from an EHR system that can help a patient heal and live a better life.
That’s why I am optimistic and energized about the collaboration with Google to map, harmonize and consolidate the data from all of Ascension’s disparate information sources to provide caregivers with a complete patient record. And applying Google’s expertise will bring a new level of understanding of a patient’s medical picture. Providers will be able to search on a keyword – from within Ascension’s secure, protected records only – and retrieve electronic results, with flagged abnormal values, directly in the patient chart.
Like many other healthcare organizations, we have moved our patient data to “the cloud” as an important first step in this process. Our cloud is a private, secure environment that is controlled by Ascension. Google is providing cloud space but is not allowed to use our patient data for its own purposes.
Some of my colleagues on the clinical staff are saying the work we are doing with Google on EHR search could be the much needed light at the end of the tunnel for reducing clerical work for physicians. Administrative work in the EHR has been cited as a leading cause of dissatisfaction and burnout among physicians. We want to bring back the joy of practicing medicine and keep these knowledgeable clinicians and leaders engaged in healing people.
I believe the work we are doing at Ascension to improve our digital records will dramatically improve the quality of care we can provide to our patients. It also has the potential to reduce overall healthcare costs as we use the power of data to help guide us to the most affordable and beneficial treatment for the patients and communities we serve.
