Leveraging Free Text in the Patient Chart

Is this a parallel to the need for automated data pulling for meaningful use?
Yes, it is. And one real potential here is that this kind of search could pull across multiple charts. Right now, you need to use report-writing tools to do this. But if you could appropriately use a search engine like this, if there’s a drug recall, I don’t need to go to our CCL report writer people; I could quickly type in Celebrex, for example, if there were a recall or something, and within a minute, I’d have a list of patients who might be on Celebrex. And for meaningful use, we have to do quality measure reporting, and we’ve got teams and teams of people doing that. So I could quickly search for Pneumovax, a pneumococcal vaccine, to see which high-risk, over-60 patients might have had that immunization, for example.

You’re the alpha site, obviously? When might this go beyond the University of Missouri?
It’s happening now. Cerner has a collaborative environment for its customers. Cerner is piloting this widely. And at the Cerner users’ conference this spring, Neal Patterson, the CEO, invited me up onstage, and we demo’ed it, and they’re planning to give this away free to all their clients. And Cerner would like potentially to look at how the data is being utilized; so people are just trying to make sure they’re comfortable with that. Right now, Cerner is giving ChartSearch away free to all its customers, and is also giving them a sepsis alert system.

When did Cerner start giving it away?
It was in October of last year that Cerner made the announcement at its users’ conference, but I know of at least one hospital in Florida has begun using it.

What has been learned so far?
I did a little study last fall involving 10 family physicians and internists, and gave them real-life patient data, and asked them to find out whether this patient was on an ACE inhibitor in the past, and if they were, when was it stopped and why? And we had them use ChartSearch and not use ChartSearch; and we found that we demonstrated that we saved them two minutes out of a three or four minute search without ChartSearch.

That’s significant for a doctor who’s busy, isn’t it?
Very. If we only have 15 minutes for a patient visit, a lot of times, we’ll give up if we don’t have time while the patient is with us. And the number of clicks was dramatically reduced as well, from over 30 clicks before, to around 10 clicks with ChartSearch. And pretty much 100 percent were satisfied, and were looking forward to using it.

This tool could help physicians potentially stay more on the free-text side of the ledger while providing a tool that is useful for data retrieval, right?
Yes. And we’re looking to be able to appropriately search multiple charts at once; and ultimately, I’m working with Cerner to link this across systems, to develop one search box that would work across the patient chart system, the other medical resources we have, such as drug databases and journals, and also I have an Intranet of four gigabytes of data that’s storing information on who’s on call, and policies on lab results, that I need at the point of care. And if I can make it a lot easier by having a Google-like interface that searches a lot of things that Google doesn’t search, that’s really going to make a big impact on my job.