Advanced EHR Application Features Assist Caregivers with Improved Patient and Operational Workflows

Penn Medicine’s EHR partner, Epic, has continually enhanced and updated available features across all our licensed application modules. Epic’s ‘Honor Roll’ program has incentivized customers to adopt and use these features. Participating in this program allows us to deliver benefits related to new capabilities and be eligible to receive a reward from Epic when we have demonstrated that specific adoption requirements have been met.

A project team was assembled to engage all Epic EHR (PennChart) application teams and representation from the infrastructure and reporting teams. This team worked with their respective operational areas to review new feature adoption opportunities and Honor Roll program requirements.

Six Honor Roll program components were tracked and successfully met:

• Enterprise Data and Analytics

• Health Information Exchange

• Infrastructure Stability and Performance

• Patient Experience

• Population Health

• Staying Current

Enabling features included in these components and allowed the following benefits to be attained:

• Improvements in patient experience

• Faster release of test results in the patient portal

• Allowing patients to better manage appointments online

• Use of eCheck-in to reduce in-clinic wait times at registration

• Implementation of “Fast Pass” to give patients the opportunity for earlier appointment times

• Use of “Health Maintenance” reminders for annual screenings and wellness visits

• Workflow efficiency and system stability

• Implementation of image exchange to send and receive images with outside organizations

• Improvements in overall system performance, specifically note launching and ordering workflows

• Staying current with Epic version releases and enhancements

• Population Health

• Staying Current

By participating in this initiative, over 105 new enhancements were upgraded and implemented to the application version that allows us to remain current with Epic functionality. We also increased the response time for three heavily used workflows by an average of 40 points, allowing for better system performance. Lastly, we achieved Honor Roll Cum Laude status, which resulted in a reward from Epic.

Penn Medicine at Home Implemented Electronic Visit Verification for Medicaid Claims

To automate documentation and ensure workplace compliance for Medicaid at home care services, Penn Medicine instituted a configurable mobile point-of-care field force management and Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) platform. The system electronically verifies the delivery dates and times of home services to the individuals needing these services and to the state aggregators. Medicaid claims are paid based on the submitted data, which affects reimbursement, patient safety, and satisfaction.

Cardiology Studies Respond More Readily with Remote Access Capability

The cardiology department’s multi-modality reading solution was upgraded to provide new feature enhancements, mapping solutions, and increase measurement options filing to our electronic health record application. Clinicians now have advanced remote capabilities to review studies at home to provide faster on-call results.

Penn Cardiology was able to upgrade the system at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Pennsylvania Hospital, and a host of offsite ambulatory practices. Finally, later in the year, the inclusion of Chester County Hospital made the upgrade an enterprise-wide solution.

The technology team added servers to house the software, installed the testing environment, and the command center was operational for a week for support calls. Remote desktop software was installed onto designed PCs to allow staff to use upgraded remote capabilities.

Care Everywhere Image Exchange Helps Facilitate Patient Care

Image exchange helps clinicians visualize the care that patients receive at other organizations and helps with informing each respective caregiver’s part of the patient’s treatment plan. By exchanging documents and using reference-quality images, members of a patient’s care team from multiple health systems can see information like x-rays, EKGs, wound images, consents, and EMS run sheets in the patient’s chart. All this data provides an additional layer of detail, shared through health information exchange (HIE).

To facilitate this exchange at Penn Medicine, our PennChart EHR team enabled new technology to exchange image files with other organizations including consents, results, and radiology images (DICOM) through Epic’s Care Everywhere network. This technology development allowed clinicians at other facilities to have approved access to patient data, such as non-discrete information, and reference quality images for radiology and other imaging results.

Penn Medicine was one of the first Epic organizations in the region to go live with enabling Care Everywhere Image Exchange. The PennChart development team worked with clinical and business counterparts to acquire and install infrastructure, including support for share and retrieval of DICOM images with participating organizations. The team also developed education materials and communication to inform providers of the new information available for sharing through the EHR. Within just two hours of the initial go live, Penn Medicine retrieved 5 images and sent over 900, mostly to non-Epic organizations. Since 9/30/22 we have successfully retrieved 186,832 images.