Beth Israel Deaconess Community Hospitals
Keeps Clinicians and Patients Connected With One Touch Feature in MEDITECH
In 2018, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s three community hospitals in Greater Boston went LIVE on a single MEDITECH Expanse EHR. The initiative, called CommunityONE, centered on integrating clinical data and driving quality improvement. Accomplishing these goals meant not only moving forward with an advanced, web-based EHR, but also exchanging patient information with several affiliated organizations using other vendors’ EHRs.
“We knew that in order to have a successful patient experience and physician experience, across our continuum, we absolutely needed to focus and really succeed in interoperability,” said Jeannette Currie, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess’s Community Hospitals.
A more comprehensive history of care
The One Touch button — an EHR-to-EHR interoperability solution — makes it easy for Beth Israel clinicians to open other vendors’ EHRs and view patient charts for a more comprehensive history of care. Likewise, clinicians at allied organizations are able to use One Touch to access Beth Israel’s EHR. Beth Israel had worked with MEDITECH to develop the One Touch button in its legacy system and collaborated to extend that same functionality to Expanse.
Patient information is exchanged among four different care settings using One Touch, including Beth Israel’s academic medical center and three key referral partners. For example, the three Beth Israel Deaconess community hospitals use the feature to access the EHR of a local referral partner. In turn, the referral partner uses One Touch to access both the CommunityONE EHR and the homegrown EHR used by the Boston hospital.
Embedded directly into the clinical workflow, the One Touch button enables clinicians to share sign-on credentials between EHRs, eliminating the need for additional taps or data entry associated with reauthentication.
Peace of mind
The feature also provides peace of mind for physicians by improving continuity of care.
“One of the biggest concerns and fears that physicians have is missing something, especially when they’ve ordered a test and they are waiting for that result to come back. So to have it come back into their EMR and provide the notification and give an indication that it’s back, resulted, and ready to be reviewed and acted upon is critical for our patient safety efforts,” said Currie.
“At a medical executive meeting, the head of one of our key physician practices described it as an absolute game changer to have that one-touch access from their existing EMR into our hospital system,” she added.
Beth Israel continues its work to expand the One Touch initiative; instead of providing physicians with individual buttons for each hospital, the organization plans to consolidate them into a single button with an amalgamation of the patient’s data. This effort will improve interoperability to help keep clinicians and their patients better connected during care transitions.