Enhancing Data Visibility in the Emergency Care Environment

The patient’s healthcare journey extends beyond admission and discharge; it’s a continuous process. However, ensuring care continuity remains a significant challenge for healthcare providers. Persistent gaps in patient data across various points of care hinder effective care coordination. Key information isn’t easily aggregated and delivered at the point of care. Limited visibility into care transitions, different care points, and patient histories continues to impact the delivery of emergency care. Without seamless access to comprehensive patient insights, emergency departments (EDs) face difficulties in providing timely, precise diagnoses and accurate care.

Integral components of the patient journey encompass detailed information on encounters from inpatient, ambulatory, other EDs, and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Medical uncertainty can be reduced by leveraging admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) data, non-standard data, and care or safety insights from extended providers. Yet, challenges persist regarding the sharing, integrating, and managing of this data within ED workflows. 

Challenges in Accessing Comprehensive Patient Data

When emergency care teams have access to only a single episode of care, they face the challenge of piecing together medical histories. This can delay treatment as they hunt for information on primary care providers, imaging, diagnostic tests, medications, and active care plans. The repetitive process of data collection, detective work, and transcription occurs at various care points, resulting in a time-consuming and imprecise method that often fails to provide a complete or accurate picture. The urgency of critical care situations often prevents ED staff from accessing complete patient histories. Consequently, patient outcomes can suffer, valuable resources are consumed, and healthcare costs rise.

Care teams shouldn’t have to piece together prior medical histories from limited information. They need comprehensive patient data at their fingertips, allowing them to focus their time and expertise on decisions and care delivery rather than searching for critical information.

Decreasing Unnecessary Utilization With Collaborative Insights

Some EDs have patients they recognize by name because these individuals visit every week. This frequent presence may be due to social determinants of health (SDoH). High utilizers might lack access to an after-hours provider for managing a chronic condition or be uninsured and unable to afford their medication. Perhaps they don’t want to be alone at home or they have run out of food. Having a place to capture this type of information as part of the patient’s medical history can improve the experience for both the patient –– by shortening length of stay –– and the staff –– by helping them provide more appropriate care faster. When care teams see this patient arrive in their ED weekly, or if the patient frequents other EDs for the same reasons, they can all access these insights. This information guides them in asking the right questions and connecting the patient with appropriate community resources to address non-emergent care needs.

However, if these collaborative insights aren’t documented and shared across the healthcare ecosystem, a different ED in another health system may spend time trying to diagnose the patient, providing unnecessary tests and treatments, when the patient might merely need assistance accessing the local food bank. By sharing collaborative insights, health systems ensure the patient isn’t receiving avoidable medical treatment, impacting utilization and throughput, or adding to healthcare costs.

Mitigating Safety and Security Events With Patient Insights

Emergency care teams and the patients they treat can also benefit from insights that may not typically be included in the electronic health record (EHR) or be easy to find, if noted at all. This includes histories that may affect the safety and security of the patient or ED staff. For example, when a provider in another ED or a member of the patient’s broader care team captures and records information about threatening or violent behavior, it ensures that other providers treating the patient are made aware. Substance use, medication mismanagement, or mental health crises can cause patients to behave or react in ways that can endanger themselves and the ED staff. Without this information at the point of registration, care teams may miss triggers that could cause a patient distress or remain unaware of how current conditions may affect the patient’s behavior.

Receiving advance notice that a patient is triggered by people wearing red shirts or becomes reactive to loud noises when medications are improperly mixed can help ED staff prepare to support the patient in a less threatening manner, while also ensuring the safety of the care team.

Ensuring Continuity of Care for Higher-Risk, Vulnerable Patients

According to recent research, 33% of patients discharged to SNFs have an avoidable ED visit within 30 days.¹ However, data is frequently unavailable for patients transferring from a SNF or post-acute care setting back to the ED. This missing information is crucial for ensuring continuity of care and potentially avoiding rehospitalization. A summarized view of the SNF stay and recommended care guidelines can provide a more complete picture of the patient’s current status and risk. Knowing which facility and providers were delivering care, and most importantly, a patient’s diagnosis, medications, and treatment plans can enable faster evaluation and decisions in the ED, helping to stabilize the patient and potentially return them to the SNF where they can continue the most appropriate care.

The Importance of Real-Time Patient Insights in Emergency Care

To improve the continuity of care and facilitate the accurate and swift delivery of emergency care, we must improve data sharing across the healthcare ecosystem. This means ensuring EDs have access to real-time patient insights, including ADT and readmission data, collaborative insights from their broader care teams, and insights about SNF stays. Improved data sharing allows for better understanding of patient needs, enabling care staff to focus on the patient and leading to better decision-making and improved outcomes.