Home >> Tag Archives: Electronic health records/electronic medical record systems

Tag Archives: Electronic health records/electronic medical record systems

A gap in need of a fix: EHRs and genomics

January 2022—“Workflow” evokes a process that moves smoothly, like water, that doesn’t break down or grind to a halt, a sequence of steps that can be completed in a seamless manner. Genomic workflows in information systems, however, have an especially poor fit with the concept of “flow.” As genomic data migrate from the laboratory to an electronic health record or from one EHR to another, significant gaps can result between generation, interoperability, and utilization that may lead the data to miscommunicate or mislead. “The technology behind next-generation sequencing and genetic testing in general has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last 10 to 15 years,” says Alexis Carter, MD, physician informaticist, pathology and laboratory medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. While the use of genomic testing has expanded rapidly, “information systems and electronic health records have really not been able to keep up.”

Read More »

Results release: new steps under new rules?

October 2021—Neither pathologists nor laboratories should panic over the new 21st Century Cures Act rules making laboratory results immediately accessible to patients, pathology leaders agree. Most laboratories already release results to electronic health records and those results are made available in patient portals, and the Cures Act will require little change in how labs send results to EHR systems. But the rules, which took effect April 5, do come with some complexities to navigate. By passing the Cures Act in 2016, Congress aimed broadly to increase interoperability across EHR platforms and to ensure that patients have full, portable, and cost-free access to their health care information. Of most direct relevance to pathology is the Cures Act’s information blocking or open notes rule, mandating that lab report narratives and pathology report narratives, along with six other categories of clinical notes, be available without delay to patients in different electronic formats, including smartphones and secure online portals.

Read More »

Weeks of lab turmoil follow cyberattack

April 2021—After he finished interviewing for a fellowship one morning last October at the University of Vermont Medical Center, pathology resident William O. Humphrey, MD, checked in to attend grand rounds virtually. Then the cyberattack struck. It began mysteriously, with people dropping one by one off the Zoom screen and emails arriving only intermittently. Internet service grew patchy and a hospital staffer unmuted and canceled grand rounds, saying, “We aren’t really sure what’s going on.” From there, a cascade of failures indicated serious trouble. “All of a sudden we’re realizing we can’t sign into our EMR. We can’t get into our email either. My phone isn’t working on the Wi-Fi. Something is wrong,” recalls Dr. Humphrey, a member of the CAP Informatics Committee. That was the prelude to a siege in which fax machines and penmanship were unretired from obsolescence, paperlessness became a relic of the past, and words like “runners” and “bouncers” entered routine laboratory vocabulary.

Read More »

Ups and downs of bringing in Beaker AP LIS

August 2019—Having an enterprisewide health care platform can put laboratories in a stronger decision-making position for enterprisewide IT, whereas in most other circumstances, “we are relatively isolated,” said Raj C. Dash, MD, in a talk he gave at this year’s Executive War College. Dr. Dash, vice chair of pathology IT at Duke University Medical Center, shared what he called the blessings and curses of his department’s move in 2014 to a lab information system that’s fully integrated with the electronic medical record. His focus was Beaker’s AP-LIS module.

Read More »

Skirting the pitfalls of merging lab results

May 2018—“One of these things is not like the others” is a fun puzzle for kids in the context of Sesame Street. But it can be a vexing informatics challenge when you are managing data entered in fields in a database. For anyone charged with merging outside laboratory results into an institution’s electronic health record alongside results from an in-house laboratory, the differences can generate no end of headaches.

Read More »

LIS to EHR: Is results transmission what it should be?

January 2015—While no one would question the virtues of accurate laboratory results, a recently concluded Q-Probes study is a new reminder that alone they’re not enough. Results should be reviewed before a lab goes live with a new interface that transmits results to the electronic health record, as well as when changes are made at the laboratory or EHR level that could alter test resulting. They also should be reviewed periodically, say the authors of the study, titled “Validating Laboratory Results in Electronic Health Records.”

Read More »
CAP TODAY
X