8 NOVEMBER - 2022IN MY OPINIONInterfacility transport medicine is a niche environment, with highly specialized staff, equipment, and IT needs. Our industry, much like the rest of healthcare, has become increasingly reliant on IT infrastructure to support our mission. This IT infrastructure is often customized to the individual program, resulting in minimal or custom interfacing with other hospital-based IT infrastructure. During our recent transition to new dispatch and clinical EMRs for our transport team, we wrestled with some of these barriers. Through a commitment to innovation and improvement in system processes, we were able to identify unique business problems, engage with our vendor and local IT experts, and develop unique solutions. We would like to share our success in the hopes that it would encourage similar innovation and integration in your unique environments.While hospital EMR systems have become well established, they are built with the primary focus of inpatient and outpatient care in the hospital and clinic settings. Specialized EMRs have been developed to meet the unique needs of transport medicine, although often they are focused either on clinical documentation or on dispatch documentation. Both types of transport EMR have undergone substantial improvement in recent years. In many cases, transport clinical EMRs can link to hospital EMRs, automatically importing the run chart into the patient's inpatient record. However, dispatch EMR systems have still lagged in their ability to communicate directly with hospital EMR systems.At our organization, our communications center uses a dispatch EMR not only for the documentation of interfacility transport requests, but also for the documentation of EMS consultations for patients being transported to our emergency department. We have a regulatory commitment to have each EMS consultation signed by the emergency physician who is receiving notification of the inbound unit and who may provide medical recommendations to these units. These charts must then be available for quality assurance purposes and for audit by regulatory bodies.As there was no established integration between our dispatch and hospital EMRs, this process was strictly on paper. The PDF chart would be emailed to a coordinator who would print it, track down the correct physician to sign it, and then would file the chart for later QA or audit. This was a very Overcoming a Manual Process with a High-Tech SolutionBy Brian Barnett, Director, Division of Transport Medicine, Children's National HospitalBrian Barnett
< Page 7 | Page 9 >