Combined best practices improve patient care, enable research
Ask nurses at two different healthcare organizations how to address common care challenges like patient fall risk in the EHR, and you’ll likely get two different answers. The Nursing Collaborative, a rotating group of nursing, informatics, and research professionals from the Epic community, takes on these challenges by reconciling best practices into standard recommendations.
“We combine each member’s perspective into a common denominator we can all agree on,” explains the Nursing Collaborative’s lead Epic clinician, Chelsea Biel. “Each organization can build on our recommendations, but the program helps elevate and standardize a baseline best practice.” The program for fall prevention recommends assessing a patient’s fall risk on admission, for example, and offers several suggestions for how nurses might record and communicate that risk.
These standards help organizations collect, compare, and share EHR data for research and improvement projects, says Tess Settergen, a Nursing Collaborative member and director of nursing informatics standards at Cedars-Sinai Health System. “The process [of]… sharing lessons learned and evolving standards was phenomenal.”
The Nursing Collaborative has grown from a pilot group of seven community members to more than 60 participating organizations. Their published recommendations are prebuilt in Epic’s Foundation System for 10 workflows, and the group plans to address topics like longitudinal care planning and diabetes screening this summer.
Are you an Epic community member interested in participating in the Nursing Collaborative? Learn more here.
