Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital plans to switch to an Epic EHR implementation enable interoperability with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
New Hampshire-based Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital will move to a new Epic EHR implementation as part of an effort to achieve interoperability with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, which also uses an Epic system.
The new system will connect APD Memorial Hospital’s clinical and hospital systems and enable interoperability with care facilities part of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health. Care sites part of DHH include Dartmouth-Hitchcock Community Group practices in southern New Hampshire and Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire.
Patients will also have the opportunity to use Epic’s patient portal, MyChart, to communicate with providers, pay bills, and schedule appointments online. MyChart is accessible through desktop computers or mobile apps.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
The system — called eD-H — will connect APD patients’ clinical and ambulatory care health information for a longitudinal medical record. Prior to the Epic implementation, patients’ health information existed across several different systems.
APD Memorial Hospital officially launched the transition on Saturday, May 11.
“This transition to eD-H provides the foundation for APD’s future,” said APD President and CEO Sue Mooney, MD, MS, FACOG. “It will not only improve the care of our patients, but allow APD to work with D-HH to identify new opportunities to provide services that our patients and the community desire.”
The new EHR system will enable patients access to digital appointment reminders and requests, online access to request prescription renewals, and access to lab and test results. Additionally, the Epic system will make patients’ health information accessible to their care teams at DHMC, Community Group practices, and Cheshire Medical Center.
Last year, DHMC earned a $9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to leverage its Epic EHR system to contribute to research into improving cancer care.
NIH and the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot initiative will fund the consortium — called the SIMPRO Research Center — as part of the effort to integrate the use of electronic patient-reported outcomes into oncology care.
“Integration of patient-reported outcomes is at the heart of our patient-centered care philosophy,” said NCCC Director Steven Leach, MD.
“As the only NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center located outside of a major urban center, NCCC can play a leading role in delivering care to rural populations,” Leach continued. “SIMPRO will help us to improve outcomes and experience for those rural patients.”
Physicians and researchers part of the SMIPRO Research Center will develop, implement, and evaluate an ePRO reporting and management system through an app called eSyM.Patients. Smart devices will achieve a secure connection to SIMPRO’s cancer care team through DHMC’s Epic EHR.
Epic was recently named in a KLAS 2019 Interoperability report as one of the best at displaying unstructured data such as labs and physician notes in a usable format in the EHR interface.
Along with Cerner, Epic effectively ensures healthcare providers can use outside data from external hospitals and health systems.
“Epic customers’ long-time use of Care Everywhere has given them an advantage in data sharing — they are the only customer base comfortable with outside data flowing directly into the patient chart without prior human screening,” stated researchers.
Epic also sends separate continuity of care documents for each patient encounter.
“This enables the more-automated consumption of contextual data into the EMR between Epic organizations, but the two initial non-Epic sites accessing Epic data through the CommonWell-Carequality connection were caught off guard by the number of documents they received and the need to sort through multiple documents,” noted researchers.
Date: May 17, 2019
Source: EHR Intelligence