Improving patient care and provider efficiency with innovative tools within the electronic medical record [abstract]

Abstract

With residents and attending facing more limited work hours, the need for an efficient rounding system has become essential. An analysis of the initial EMR-generated rounding report found that residents and attendings reported daily timesavings of 45 minutes with its use. Seventy-six percent of users also agreed that the rounding report improved patient safety. However, this rounding report is only viewable when printed and does not update with real-time patient information. Our team created a completely EMR-generated real-time rounding report for use during pre-rounding, team rounds, and sign-out/hand offs. We hypothesized that this would reduce workloads and improve chart information quality. We conducted surveys of the residents and faculty members of the Departments of Family and Community Medicine and Internal Medicine, as well as chart audits to analyze input of important values such as code status and correct admitting diagnosis. We expect rounding report users will be more satisfied with the rounding process, spend less time updating other lists or documents and less time pre-rounding. Hopefully this will allow physicians more time with their patients, result in better adherence to work hour rules, further increase the accuracy of information during sign-out, improve overall satisfaction, and decrease clinically relevant errors.