Working Smarter, Not Harder
As we swelter through another summer, I want to talk about another hot topic, our ongoing opportunities to improve documentation efficiency within Epic.
Before we talk about future opportunities, let’s celebrate some recent successes!
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Since March, our nurses spend an average of 15 minutes less per shift actively working in Epic, according to a recent report from Epic.
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Your agreement that Epic improves efficiency places us in the 89th percentile among similar health care organizations, according to the initial results from our KLAS survey in May.through another summer, I want to talk about another hot topic, our ongoing opportunities to improve documentation efficiency within Epic.
Not surprisingly, all of you quickly adapted to the hurricane and its wake, prioritizing our patients and the community. Your fortitude, focus and resilience helped us come out of this stronger.
How we got here
Our focus on improving clinician efficiency has used innovation to help redistribute work. Previous projects with virtual nursing or automated documentation, like vitals with BioIntelliSense, are just a part of that effort. We also made several changes directly within Epic, including:
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Decreased pop-up alerts (BPAs) and worklist tasks.
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Simplified workflows. like medication education and pain reassessment documentation (Pain Reassess on MAR tip sheet).
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Added a Shift Assessment Navigator to pull together essential nursing documentation elements in a comprehensive list view.
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Added flowsheet macros (pre-completed templates) for the Complex Assessment and PIV LDA Assessment (Flowsheet Macro tip sheet).
What’s next?
We’re actively working to provide even more opportunities to benefit nursing and other care provider roles, including:
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Optimizing Epic tools and workflows, including expanding the availability of macros to additional flowsheets and increasing direct documentation from the Brain. The informatics team will continue to work with specific service areas and roles to optimize their documentation workflows within Epic.
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Piloting an AI-generated end-of-shift care plan note in Epic. This AI model reviews care plan goals, as well as relevant flowsheet documentation to create a succinct summary of patient progression on goals.
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Investigating opportunities with multiple vendors for documentation within flowsheets based on ambient listening. The goal is to automatically capture documentation as nursing or other disciplines verbally interact and assess patients.
