COMPANY: Mediclinic Middle East
CHALLENGE: Help clinicians provide best practice care to patients while the treatment, guidelines, and the evidence was still evolving during the COVID-19 pandemic.
OUTCOME: Leveraged the COVID-19 screening tool, presented by InterSystems, and incorporated it in our workflows to prompt frontline/triage nurses to ask all the relevant questions and based on WHO guidelines.
Expert Knowledge at Your Fingertips Using TrakCare InfoLinks
When looking for peer reviewed clinical knowledge and decision support guidance, many customers turn to content from trusted vendors such as IMO and Wolters Kluwer. For many years, TrakCare has enabled clinicians to navigate to such information using the InfoLink Buttons located throughout the system – these provide easy access to contextually relevant information and accurately coded clinical data without having to leave normal workflows or sign on to another system when seeking decision support.
Recently, both Wolters Kluwer’s and Elsevier announced the availability of content specific to COVID-19. Clinicians can access this information easily using InfoLinks.
InterSystems customer Mediclinic Middle East, a private hospital group with seven hospitals in UAE with more than 900 inpatient beds and 20 outpatient clinics throughout the region, has taken advantage of this capability during the pandemic.
Dr. Rahul Goyal Shares His Experience
"Mediclinic quickly saw the COVID-19 endemic becoming a pandemic and acted quite swiftly to introduce tools and measures in Bayanaty (Mediclinic’s branded version of TrakCare) to help clinicians provide best practice care to patients while the treatment, guidelines, and the evidence was still evolving.
We leveraged the COVID-19 screening tool presented to us by the InterSystems team and incorporated it in our workflows to prompt frontline/triage nurses to ask all the relevant questions and based on WHO guidelines. The tool would indicate to the clinical team whether the patient should be suspected of having an infection and therefore the need do further testing.
We have a pre-existing integration with intelligent medical objects (IMO) and UpToDate on the diagnosis screen. IMO terminology search helps the clinicians to search the most appropriate diagnosis using a “Google type” search, while the UpToDate InfoLink helps the physicians to search for an appropriate resource, management or treatment update, patient information leaflets, etc... at the click of a button.
We also updated our ICD-10 and SNOMED configuration to accommodate the latest COVID-19 codes.
Added to that, we went through the national unified guidelines in the UAE and converted the recommended baseline investigations into order-sets so that the physicians could order by one click to reduce the potential for any variance in treatment. We did an audit of the order-set usage and found that it had been used more than 500 times in less than a week.
As a Physician Informatics lead for MediClinic, I send out a monthly bulletin to all TrakCare users highlighting enhancements and quick tips and we sent out an “extra” supplementary COVID-19 enhancement bulletin in the end of March.
In summary, I feel the enhancements were timely and helped clinicians focus more on patient care and the regular communication through newsletters/bulletins assured them that the screening tool and order sets in the system are current and relevant and evidence-based.”
Searching for and accurately selecting a coded COVID-19 Diagnosis using IMO Terminology lookup on diagnosis screen.
Access to Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate COVID-19 information from the InfoLink on Diagnosis entry screen
Viewing Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate COVID-19 information without leaving TrakCare.
This story originally appeared the May 26, 2020- OnTrak News Flash No.4: The Fight Against COVID-19 newsletter