Tag Archives: Trauma flow sheet

Hospital, Trauma Center

Trauma Patient Stay In The ED After Implementing an Electronic Health Record

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So as we discovered, we may spend less time and see fewer patients if we use an EHR. One would think that ED length of stay (LOS) would then increase. But does it?

A 2 year observational study from Greece looked at ED throughput before and after implementation of an electronic trauma documentation system. A total of 101 trauma patients were processed under the paper charting system, and 99 were handled after implementation of the electronic system.

Here are the factoids:

  • Injury severity was high overall, with half going for emergent surgery and an overall mortality rate of about 12%
  • Total ED LOS decreased from 206 to 127 minutes with the EHR
  • This was accomplished by decreasing time between arrival and completion of care from 149 to 100 minutes, and from completion of care to leaving the ED from 47 to 26 minutes

Bottom line: Looks great! Badly hurt patients, moving through the ED at breakneck speed after implementation of an EHR. The problem is that it was not really an EHR, but an “electronic documentation system.” Upon close inspection, this is a homegrown system with very specific functionality for monitoring care, providing checklists, and offering case-specific guidance. This is not the type of complex documentation system one usually thinks of when visualizing an EHR. But it does go to show that well-designed and focused software can be beneficial.

Tomorrow, I’ll start to focus specifically on the electronic trauma flow sheet (eTFS).

Reference: The effect of an electronic documentation system on the trauma patient’s length of stay in an emergency department. J Emerg Nursing 40(5)469-475, 2014.

Hospital, Trauma Center

A Brief History of the Electronic Health Record

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The EHR has been around longer than you think. Even before the current desktop style microcomputers existed, a few hospitals implemented early versions of this product. One of the first was the Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City. It installed what it called the HELP system, an acronym for Health Evaluation through Logical Programming.

As computing power increased and the size of the computer box and its cost decreased, a series of advances in medical software systems began to occur. In 1983, a software product geared toward resource scheduling was introduced, and became one of the leading applications of its kind. Most people recognize the name Cadence, but few realize that this was one of the earliest product releases from Epic Systems Corporation.

In 1988, the US government contracted out to develop an electronic record system for the military, much of which is still in use today. On a smaller scale, PC type computers were almost 10 years old in 1990 when Microsoft introduced what I consider the first real version of Windows, version 3.0. Epic was once again an innovator, and it released a product called EpicCare for Windows.

Beginning in 2004, there was a move within the government to emphasize implementation of EHRs across the US, spearheaded by President George W. Bush. And as expected, this led to a number of products developed by a variety of software makers. The push to roll out an EHR universally continues to this day, with no end in sight.

Is this a good thing or a bad one? Although much maligned, the EHR can certainly offer benefits. However, like anything touted as a miracle drug or device, there are always downsides. I’ll review both over the course of the week, but my focus will be on one very specific trauma problem: use of the EHR during trauma resuscitation. Many trauma programs either voluntarily adopted the use of an electronic trauma flow sheet (eTFS), or were forced into it by their hospital administration or IT department. Good idea or not?

We shall see…

Hospital, Trauma Systems

Trauma And The Electronic Health Record

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I’m going to dedicate this week to discussing the impact of the electronic health record (EHR) on trauma care.

First, I’ll talk a little about the history of the EHR, how it came about and why it was “encouraged” of all hospitals. I’ll also look at who the big players are. Next, I’ll review two studies of the impact of the EHR on ED productivity and patient stay.

And finally, I’ll really dig into using an electronic trauma flow sheet that interfaces with the EHR. My thinking has slowly been changing, but not by much. I’ll review my reasons, and talk about the (few) success stories that are out there.

Stay tuned!

Performance Improvement

Dealing With Trauma Flow Sheet Documentation Problems

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Over the years, I’ve commented a number of times on paper vs electronic trauma flow sheet. For those of you who somehow missed it, let me recap. Don’t use an electronic trauma flow sheet yet if you can possibly avoid it!

I look at the flow sheet as having two phases, input and output. The input phase occurs as data is being recorded on the sheet, hopefully in real time as events occur during the trauma resuscitation and its aftermath. The output phase consists of a human reviewing the completed flow sheet and analyzing the events and timing for performance improvement (PI) purposes.

The electronic trauma flow sheet has major problems in both phases. But the good, old-fashioned paper sheet isn’t perfect either. It is subject to problems during the input phase. The most common issue is incomplete documentation. I’ve seen so many trauma programs with ongoing issues in this area, and they struggle to find ways to improve or eliminate the missing data.

Here are a few tips you should consider:

  • Make sure your paper flow sheet is well-designed. Data items should not be scattered randomly over several pages. Primary survey items should be grouped together. Medications must have their own block. Diagnostic tests performed (not ordered) should be in the same area. Make sure that the narrative block that typically has vital signs and free-form text about what is happening is large enough, with enough room to write comfortably. There are so many good trauma flow sheets out there already. Borrow a few to see if your program can adopt some of the organizational concepts found on them.
  • Identify the commonly incomplete items at your program, then redesign the flow sheet to cluster them together in one prominent spot on it. Common missed items include patient temperature, time of diagnostic tests, and admitting destination  and time the patient leaves the emergency department.
  • If you have only a few problem data points and don’t want to totally redesign your form, manually highlight those blocks with an old-fashioned highlighting pen. This only works if you are highlighting a few items. Any more than two or three, and the scribe will start to ignore all of them. The fancy colored blocks will draw the eye and remind them to ask for the data.
  • Perform an accuracy review of the sheet soon after the resuscitation, ideally before the end of the nursing shift. And since the scribes are typically emergency nurses, it should be their responsibility. Not the trauma program’s. The ED nurses should take responsibility for their own work, and develop their own program to self-correct any deficiencies.

Do you have any suggestions or best practices that have worked for you? Please comment or tweet!

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Technology

The Electronic Trauma Flow Sheet – Final Answer

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After more than 8 years of experience, moving to an electronic trauma flow sheet is still not ready for prime time. I’ve seen many, many hospitals struggling to make it work. And all but a very few have failed.

There are two major problems. First, existing computer input technology is underdeveloped. Trying to rapidly put information into small windows on a computer, and having to switch between mouse and keyboard and back is just too slow. And second, output reports are terrible. Humans cannot scan 26 pages of chronological data and reconstruct a trauma activation in their head. There is so much extra data in the typical computer-generated reports, the signal (potential PI issues) gets lost in the noise.

The technology exists to remedy both of the problems. However, the EHR vendors keep tight control over data exchange in and out of their products. Sure, there is CareAnywhere and it’s ilk, but the user is still forced to use the vendor’s flawed input and output systems.

Bottom line: You can’t make a complex system (trauma care) easier or safer by adding complexity (the EHR). Yet.

The electronic trauma flow sheet will never work as well as it could until all the vendors settle on a strong data interchange standard to put data into and get reports out of the EHR. Once that happens, scores of startup companies will start to design easy input systems and report outputs or displays that are actually meaningful. There’s not enough interest in this niche market to make it worthwhile for a company the size of Epic or McKesson, but there is definitely enough for a lot of young companies just chomping at the bit in Silicon Valley.