Support for Conferences and Scientific Meetings R13

Univ Of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The electronic health record (EHR) is a powerful tool that has the potential to facilitate communication across healthcare systems. The EHR has the capability to support the needs of clinicians, patients, caregivers, administrators, researchers, payers, and other stakeholders by informing clinical practice, facilitating administrative operations (e.g., quality improvement initiatives), and supporting research. Pulmonary function testing (PFT) is a key part of the diagnostic assessment in pulmonary medicine and is critical to assessing the pulmonary status of patients over time. Currently, PFT values are typically available in a server that stores PFT data, but this is not interfaced directly to the EHR. The efforts to interface PFTs to the EHR to date have been siloed efforts that have not benefited from a unified approach of the pulmonary community. The ultimate goal is to have core set of PFT results reported as discrete data elements in all electronic health records for use in clinical care and research. To achieve this goal, a workshop is proposed to address the utility of successful EHR PFT interoperability for research and clinical goals and review logistical challenges and prior successes in EHR PFT integration, with the focus on developing a roadmap to PFT integration into the EHR. The speaker and participant list includes key stakeholders from adult and pediatric general and pulmonary medicine, researchers, PFT laboratories, Veterans Health Administration and health maintenance organizations, informaticists, patient-advocacy groups, and multiple EHR and PFT companies. The deliverables of the workshop have potential to advance the field and to improve quality of patient care and research in large institutions and to create a path forward to smaller healthcare systems and practices that may not have the resources otherwise required to ensure interoperabilty of PFTs.