1. Building Back Better: Applying Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic to Expand Critical Information Access.
- Author
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Schwartz, Hope EM, Stark, Nicholas R, Sowa, Cathleen S, Singh, Malini K, and Peabody, Christopher R
- Subjects
Humans ,Emergency Service ,Hospital ,Pandemics ,COVID-19 ,SARS-CoV-2 ,clinical guidelines ,design ,digital ,information ,innovation ,Health Services ,Clinical Research ,Prevention ,Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) ,Good Health and Well Being ,Clinical Sciences ,Emergency & Critical Care Medicine - Abstract
BackgroundThe Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic generated an unprecedented volume of evolving clinical guidelines that strained existing clinical information systems and necessitated rapid innovation in emergency departments (EDs).ObjectivesOur team aimed to harness new COVID-19-related reliance on digital clinical support tools to re-envision how all clinical guidelines are stored and accessed in our ED.MethodsWe used a design-thinking approach including empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing to develop a low-cost, homegrown clinical information hub: E*Drive. To measure impact, we compared web traffic on E*Drive to our legacy cloud-based folder system and conducted a survey of end-users using a validated health technology utilization instrument.ResultsOur final product, E*Drive, is a centralized clinical information hub storing everything from clinical guidelines to discharge resources. Clinical guidelines are standardized and housed within the high-traffic E*Drive platform to increase accessibility. Since launch, E*Drive has averaged 84 unique weekly users, compared with less than one weekly user on the legacy system. We surveyed 52 clinicians for a total response rate of 47%. Prior to the E*Drive rollout, 12.5% of ED clinicians felt confident accessing clinical information on the legacy system, whereas 76.6% of ED clinicians felt they could more easily access clinical information using E*Drive.ConclusionThe COVID pandemic revealed vulnerabilities within our information dissemination system and presented an opportunity to improve clinical information delivery. Centralized web-based clinical information hubs designed around the clinician end-user experience can increase clinical guideline access in the ED.
- Published
- 2021