Annually, more than 200,000 patients die in U.S. hospitals from cardiac arrest and over 130,000 patients inpatients deaths are attributed to sepsis. These deaths are preventable if patients who are at risk are detected earlier. Prior work found that nursing documentation within electronic health records (EHRs) contains information that could contribute to early detection and treatment, but these data are not being analyzed and exposed by EHRs to clinicians to initiate interventions quickly enough to save patients. A new source of predictive data is defined by analyzing the frequency and types of nursing documentation that indicated nurses' increased surveillance and level of concern for a patient. These data documented in the 48 hours preceding a cardiac arrest and hospital mortality were predictive of the event. While clinicians strive to provide the best care, there is a systematic problem within hospital settings of non-optimal communication between nurses and doctors leading to delays in care for patient at risk. Well-designed and tested EHRs are able to trend data and support communication and decision making, but too often fall short of these goals and actually increase clinician cognitive load through fragmented information displays, "note bloat", and information overload. Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technologies (SMARTapps) using Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard allow for open sharing and use of innovations across EHR systems. The aim of this project is to design and evaluate a SMARTapp on FHIR used across two large academic medical centers that exposes to physicians and nurses our new predictive data source from nursing documentation to increase care team situational awareness of at risk patients to decrease preventable adverse outcomes.
Communicating Narrative Concerns Entered by RNs (CONCERN) Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system is the application being designed and evaluated. CONCERN Intervention Trial Design will be a multiple time-series intervention. Baseline data will be collected at all study sites. Silent release mode (no SMARTapp notification) will be used in non-equivalent control units and as a post-intervention unit control to evaluate if notifying clinicians can decrease rates of length of stay on non-ICU units and rates of 30-day hospital readmissions. Different versions of the CDS system (SMARTapp) will be incorporated for dynamic, adaptive functionality and determine if the pattern of nursing documentation has changed. A "burn-in" phase is built in to evaluate adoption and adaptation to the algorithm and phases for deployment of the silent release mode within the multiple time-series intervention trial for a total of 18 months of data collection, including pre-intervention data collection and silent release modes.
