Presenter: Eric G. Poon, MD, MPH
Institution: Brigham and Womens Hospital/ Partner Information Systems
Introduction: Management of test results in the outpatient setting represents a major challenge to physicians who are expected to review an increasing number of test results and execute evidence-based follow-up plans for a large number of patients. To address this issue, Partners Healthcare in Boston, MA has developed Results Manager (RM), a browser-based, comprehensive, provider-centric tool to help clinicians manage patient test results in a reliable and efficient manner. Specifically, this application:
Improving the Quality of Abnormal Test Result Follow-up in the Ambulatory Setting: Implementation of an Electronic Results Manager at Partners Healthcare
- Presents all results ordered by a clinician from a centralized page, including test results ordered during and in between office visits.
- Presents results in order of severity and highlight those that require urgent attention by the clinician.
- Presents results in the context of previous results, patients’ medication list, and problem list.
- Allows clinicians to acknowledge the receipt of test results.
- Provides clinical decision support to improve compliance with national guidelines on the follow-up of abnormal results.
- Allows clinicians to set ticklers that will notify them if a patient fails to obtain a follow-up test.
- Improves communication between patients and physicians regarding test results by providing physicians tools to easily generate patient result letters. These letters can be generated with only a few mouse-clicks using pre-generated paragraphs pertinent to the results being reviewed.
- Alerts via email physicians whose patients have markedly abnormal results that remain unacknowledged. If physicians fail to acknowledge these results after repeated alerts, the results should be forwarded to a pre-designated person for the practice (e.g. the practice manager). This application has been successfully deployed in 10 primary care practices across the Partners Healthcare network. Feedback from attending and housestaff users has been very positive. A randomized controlled trial to study the ability of RM to improve the follow-up of abnormal test results is ongoing.
Improving the Quality of Abnormal Test Result Follow-up
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