The Importance of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for Preventive Care: Ultilizing the Patient Advisories Section in Cerner as an Aid to Record and Order Age Appropriate Preventive Screeenings

Abstract Category: Practice Innovation / Performance Improvement (PI) Purpose: The purpose of this QI project is to improve the habits of primary care physicians of reviewing and updating the patient advisory section at each patient visit. Patient advisories is a section in EMR that provides a complete list of preventive and screening tasks for each respective patient. This will standardize the process in order to ensure that patients are receiving all their preventive needs in a timely fashion. Methods: The subjects are the residents at the Family Medicine Center. To collect the baseline data, we made a random section of 10 patients from each provider\u27s schedule in the previous 3 months. The intervention was a lecture to the FMC residents to familiarize them with the patient advisories . Their record keeping is measured on a biweekly basis with a group email update on progress. Findings: In total, at baseline only 33% of patients\u27 advisories were charted as complete/satisfied and 67% remained pending. After intervention to the residents was delivered in the form of training how to complete patient advisories, 55% were reported as charted and 45% still remained pending after biweekly data collection. Discussion: This quality improvement project serves as a benchmark to compare continued PDSA cycles. This study places significant weight on screenings rendered in primary care offices to offset the burdens of disease management. It also brings special attention to the importance of using the patient advisories section in the EMR and how this process can be used to decreasing patients\u27 morbidity and mortality from chronic preventable diseases. Implications for Practice: Looking forward, it would be interesting to see if more nuance ways of record keeping can show the specific barriers to getting these preventive services in place. Limitations of this study include a small sample size and limitation to a single study site