One-on-One with Virginia Commonwealth University Health System CIO Rich Pollack, Part III

RP: Yes. The nice thing about PatientKeeper is they’ve worked with Cerner for a long time and they extract the clinical result data out of Cerner and re-present that in a format that’s suitable for the small screen of the PDA. They take the labs and put them in a fishbone diagram, things like that, which is what you need to do if you use a PDA. You can’t just simply try to replicate what you had on a 17-inch screen before.

If you sit down with clinicians, they’ll tell you what information they need at their hip. They’ll say, ‘I don’t need the whole interactive flow sheet to look at, and I don’t need pages and pages of narrative discharge summary. I just need a patient list, current lab results and the summary results of the radiology report; a few basic things.’

They’re not expecting the full experience of Cerner Millennium on a 19-inch display with bringing up the PACS images or anything like that — although we can bring those images up on the PDA. They’re really looking for a much smaller subset of critical clinical data that basically alerts them to do something; pick up the phone, put an order in, go to a terminal to do some deep inquiry, or whatever. And they pretty much understand that it’s not the same thing as the 19-inch display.

PatientKeeper has done a great job over the years of understanding that need for clinicians for a subset of critical information that could be quickly and easily presented on a PDA, and not trying to become a complete EMR in your hip pocket.

KG: Very interesting. So the big question is, by presenting with clinicians with patient data that they can access from any location, can this lead to increased EMR adoption?

RP: I absolutely think it can, because it keeps the physicians more plugged in, and so it helps in terms of their workflow. They become used to interacting with the EMR, getting that information. So they might be out to dinner and they’ll get a message about a patient on the PDA, and if it’s urgent, they’ll make a phone call from the same PDA and give instructions to take an action. On the other hand, they might look at it and say, ‘Okay, and now when I get home, I can log in from my PC and some more in-depth research.’

It kind of keeps the momentum going; you have less of a break. Otherwise, in the absence of that, it’s a situation where I can use the EMR at work and I can use it at home, but I have all this time where I have no access to it at all. You’re sort of breaking it up. This way, we keep them connected almost continuously. They’re always connected to the EMR in one shape or another.

KG: It makes complete sense. Everyone is so connected these days, so why shouldn’t doctors be able to access patient records outside the office?

RP: For physicians, residents or attending, the way life is these days, they’re never signed off completely from their patients. Their patients are still their responsibility 24/7. In the old days, you’d try to handle it by paging and phone calls if you can get them and try to describe the condition. This way, we just kind of keep the stream of clinical information flowing to the physician nonstop.