The Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS IT Innovation Advocate Award: First-Place Recipient: Neal Patel, M.D.

Exactly. And because we have a homegrown electronic health record [EHR] system, we’re able to aggregate information from proprietary systems as well as from our homegrown system, so that you can be in an analysis phase in your documentation, but actually, it will streamline the viewing process for the physician. It’s been neat, because as some concepts such as handovers and team communication—especially in an academic environment, where we have resident work hours, etc., now we can abstract the data in different ways and come up with different views of the patient, instead of having to go to each patient’s individual chart and full note, which becomes cumbersome.

So that’s one area. We are currently working with RedCap, a research tool created here at Vanderbilt that is being used everywhere now to do clinical research data capture, where individuals can manage their own clinical data. Paul Harris is the genius behind it. And it has been supported by the federal government. It’s part of our CTSA [Clinical and Translational Science Award], our clinical research arm. It’s completely outside healthcare informatics, but it can function to manage large, multi-center studies, and handle database questions for the novice. And we’ve been working on how to embed information and transition to data in the RedCap from the clinical record. It used to be that it was a separate act; it’s like you closing down your Word document and opening up a separate Excel document and entering your data. If you want to transition with your front-line clinical teams, that’s hard. So we recently embedded access to the RedCap form within our clinical documentation tool so that you don’t have to change out of the clinical documentation process. We piloted that in January. And what Vanderbilt is very good at is taking the best of the applications out there, and integrating them. So with our underlying architecture, we’re able to better integrate underlying concepts than how each individual system can do by itself.

What is the biggest project that you’re personally involved in right now?

The biggest thing right now is that we’re beginning to work on Stage 2 of meaningful use. We attested to Stage 1 back in October 2011. And we’ve had our year mark this past year. So we’re beginning to work on Stage 2. The second big project we’re involved in is a concept called integrated presence, where we’re utilizing our ability to aggregate key pieces of information, as well as real-time monitoring, and putting it into a view, for real-time monitoring for at-risk patients.

What they call conditional or situation monitoring?

Yes. Because our EHR allows us to aggregate key pieces of information through that “team summary” function into a capsule, as I mentioned, we can get you a four-panel screen with the patient’s vital signs, etc.

You personally created the “team summary”?

Yes, it was my creation; I led the development. We’re also working forward on a concept around monitoring at-risk patients in real-time, called “integrated presence.” It’s still in a pilot in the burn unit; it went live there in August, but we’re developing it forward for broader implementation. Over the next two months, we’re hoping to expand it into our surgical and pediatric ICUs, and also to get better framing for graphical trends out of our EHR data.

What are your mission and vision around the work you’re doing?

My mission and vision are to help clinicians deliver the best patient care they can, to as many patients as they can in a streamlined manner, and to use those tools optimally. So I want clinicians to be able to be most effective. I’m loath to use technology for technology’s sake; it only works if the masses can use it seamlessly. So more often than not, I’m the biggest skeptic about new tools.