The Pediatric Emergency Department in the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital are the first two non-ambulatory clinical departments at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to convert to the new Epic electronic health record system. Epic went live in both places on Aug. 6, 2014. Epic rollout
Both are also the first non-ambulatory clinical departments at the hospital to launch Epic’s companion online portal for patients (or parents, in the case of pediatric patients), known as MyChart, providing access to personal medical records.
This has been a two-year project for adult and pediatric emergency department clinicians and staff. Epic has been rolling out across Johns Hopkins Medicine since April 2013, bringing a unified electronic medical record system to community, outpatient and research clinics, as well as to Johns Hopkins’ Sibley Memorial Hospital, Howard County General Hospital and Suburban Hospital, which all now use Epic in their emergency departments.
The system needed substantial changes, however, for use in The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “The clinical needs [of the other emergency departments] are vastly different from those of a large academic teaching hospital,” said Pediatric Emergency physician Jean Ogborn, who helped structure the new system.
The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine and the Pediatric Emergency Department first transitioned from paper medical records to an earlier electronic record system, HMED, AllScripts, in 2008. All Johns Hopkins Hospital outpatient clinics converted to the new integrated electronic medical record system Epic Care Ambulatory in August 2013.
The move to Epic at Johns Hopkins Hospital and its Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have long-term value for patients of all ages. For example, if a child who is being seen and cared for by a cardiologist at Howard County General Hospital is rushed to The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Pediatric Emergency Department while on a visit to Baltimore, doctors tending to him will have immediate access to his medical records and, thus, invaluable information that could help the emergency doctors and nurses with their care decisions.
In turn, when the pediatric patients returns to see his cardiologist at Howard County General, the doctor will have access to the records of the patient’s emergency visit in Baltimore — information that could inform treatment and care decisions. Parents who signed up for MyChart will have access to hospital records of their child’s emergency and cardiology visits.
Designed to create a unified patient record system for the entire Johns Hopkins enterprise, Epic also incorporates scheduling and registration, clinical documentation, computerized provider order entry, ePrescribing, and Charge Capture, improving critical connections to affiliate and referring physicians across Johns Hopkins Medicine.
“The staff on duty has demonstrated great teamwork and adaptability in this new environment,” says Pediatric Emergency’s nurse manager, Jane Virden, of the recent Epic rollout there. “Without their great effort, teamwork and attitude, this ‘Go Live’ would not have been the success it has been so far.”
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