Challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many emergency departments’ stagnant information distribution systems to a breaking point, requiring rapid adaptation to support a constantly changing clinical care environment. San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), a University of California San Francisco-affiliated site, was no exception. As our emergency department became overloaded with rapidly-changing clinical information, the Acute Care Innovation Center (ACIC) set out to improve access to critical clinical information. The ACIC uniquely brought together a group of residents, hospital leadership, and medical students to account for different perspectives and tackle problems in an innovative manner. Our team learned that clinicians felt overwhelmed by the volume and speed of changing clinical information that was communicated from emails to cloud folder uploads. Clinicians did not know where to find the most up-to-date information. And text-heavy documents were difficult to apply in real-time on shift.
Dr. Stark
The design process led our team to an idea that was profound in its simplicity: democratizing information through an open-access, mobile-friendly, centralized digital information hub. Today, that idea has become an evolving clinical information platform called E*Drive.
E*Drive currently hosts a broad array of clinical information, ranging from COVID-19 guidelines to announcements to discharge resources, and it displays this information in a simple, standardized flow-chart style to enable in-the-moment utilization on shift. The platform has been profoundly successful, increasing access to clinical information in our emergency department by over 230 percent (from 0.13 views/day with the legacy system to nearly 30 views/day in September 2021), with 77 percent of clinicians reporting improved access to clinical information and 70 percent endorsing improved efficiency on shift as a result of E*Drive.
Dr. Peabody
Our team was able to build, launch, and sustain E*Drive for nearly free, all without in-depth tech experience. To do this, we built E*Drive on Drupal—our institution-supported web content management system—and utilized GoogleSlides to create the flow-chart style guidelines. E*Drive is easily accessible via a direct link in our medical record system or a short URL on any device with an internet connection. The platform layout is optimized for rapid information access with an average of three clicks from the homepage or via a robust search tool. The dynamic, modular nature of the E*Drive platform allows continued growth and evolution in response to user feedback. For example, we recently developed a first-of-its-kind Discharge Navigator tool (https://edrive.ucsf.edu/dcnav) that helps clinicians refer vulnerable patients to tailored community resources based on their demographics and needs. We also recently digitized frequently utilized forms, such as procedure consents, that previously needed to be accessed in cluttered filing cabinets.
E*Drive has revolutionized how our emergency department distributes and stores critical clinical information. By creating a system that is affordable, portable, and adaptable, our team hopes to inspire other emergency physicians including residents to develop similar innovations to accelerate guideline accessibility in the future.
Histories of our Present Illness
Luke Messac, MD, PhD, PGY4, Brown Emergency Medicine Residency
Pages: 1 2 3 4 | Single Page
No Responses to “Emergency Medicine Residents Share Their Innovations in Our Field”