An Epic Step Forward: A Universal Pediatric Palliative Care Navigator Within an EHR to Improve Our Understanding of the Patient Narrative (FR201A)

• Published in: Journal of pain and symptom management 2023-03, Vol.65 (3), p.e270-e270
• Main Authors: Williams, Conrad, MD, Bass, Alice, MSN APRN-CNP CPNP-PC, Thomas, Kat, BSN RN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anesthesia; Pain Medicine
• ISSN: 0885-3924; 1873-6513
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2022.12.063

Outcomes: 1. Analyze elements of a high-quality pediatric palliative care (PPC) assessment and identify common barriers to effective, thorough electronic health record EHR documentation of PPC assessments 2. Demonstrate a unique EHR tool to optimize efficient documentation, data collection, and understanding the patient's journey to positively impact the quality of PPC provided across care settings/encounters. While access to pediatric palliative care (PPC) services has improved, there remain limited strategies for effectively documenting a patient's PPC journey in the electronic health record (EHR). With the recent implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act and open note access, accurate and efficient EHR documentation is more crucial. Documenting the work of a PPC team is a challenge. PPC teams care for children with high medical complexity over the course of their lives with multiple clinical encounters occurring at various trajectories of their medical condition. Symptom concerns, psychosocial stressors, and values-guided medical decision making frequently evolve throughout the course of a serious illness experience. PPC is delivered in an interdisciplinary fashion, and EHR workflow and documentation often varies widely with each discipline. In an EHR, it is challenging for users to get a clear understanding of the course of a child's medical condition across encounters. Epic and PPC professionals came together to focus on this challenge. The first goal was to assess current practices, identifying efficient workflows and opportunities for improvements. The group developed an inpatient consult navigator for an interdisciplinary PPC team that would capture relevant information and make it easily accessible across multiple clinical encounters. The navigator improves efficiency and relevancy of healthcare professionals’ documentation and also facilitates the tracking of metrics for research, quality, and programmatic benchmark reporting. The PPC navigator is a dynamic tool that aims to better identify important domains of PPC that often evolve over the course of an illness trajectory. This session will focus on sharing key aspects of the navigator and intended workflow to educate our community of colleagues around a new method of documentation that best supports PPC teams in delivering high-quality care to children and their families. The navigator is available in Epic's Foundation System to allow access for organizations.