Asthma is one of the most common diagnoses at UCSF Health, and many children often come to the emergency department at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland because of trouble breathing.
When that happens, UCSF Health providers put together a comprehensive asthma action plan — the Home Management Plan Care, or HMPC — before they return home. This helps our children and teenagers with understanding their asthma triggers and their prescriptions.
Michael Lang, MD MPH, a member of UCSF Health Informatics and Chief Health Informatics Officer, and a team of nurses, information technology experts, and quality improvement staff. This team helped make sure that physicians and nurses completed the HMPC with a set of custom-designed alerts and decision support tools.
UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland tracks the rate in which inpatients with asthma are given an asthma action plan prior to discharge as an important quality metric. With the implementation of clinical decision support tools in our electronic health record, we were able to bring our compliance above the Joint Commission standard of 85%.
Michael Lang, MD MPH
Associate CMIO, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland
These clinical decision support tools helped spur a compliance rate of 96%, well above the Joint Commission standard of 85%. The alerts were designed to provide subtle reminders to physicians to complete this plan. The group hopes to spread this innovation to the remainder of UCSF Health.
This project was presented at the 2016 UCSF Health Improvement Symposium, by Michael Lang, Anna Keller (Epic computerized provider order entry team), Mary Willoughby (Quality and Patient Safety), Tamara Bolinger (RN Manager), Karen Jennings (RN Manager), and Ted Chaconas (Director, Pediatric Hospitalist).
About UCSF Health Informatics
UCSF Health Informatics provides clinical leadership for the electronic health record (EHR) to empower patients, families, and our healthcare providers. The group facilitates the implementation of new clinical content, perform studies with healthcare data, and design, integrate, and deploy the EHR. These information technologies advance the delivery of healthcare. APeX — Advancing Patient-Centered Excellence — is UCSF Health's version of the Epic EHR.
About UCSF
UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, transitional and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.
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