Globally, one in four people over age 25 will have a stroke in their lifetime (Source: World Stroke Organization 2022). Join Shanza Ashraf's, Deborah Westover and Mathu Kumarasamy from Emory Healthcare's presentation on
harnessing data to empower the clinicians' approach to stroke management.
"Our Stroke Quality Team is responsible for concurrent and retrospective chart reviews, performance improvement projects, and data submission to a national stroke registry. Manual processes and lack of standardization led to extended review times and incomplete data. This project's purpose was to design standardized tools to facilitate clinical workflows by leveraging automation and database technology. We assessed the current state of stroke patient review at 6 hospitals and noticed manual data entry, siloed spreadsheets, inconsistent data fields, and manual email alerts. From the discrepancies, we found a set of common reports needed at all sites and identified fields that were discretely available in the EHR. We then investigated how REDCap could be used as an operational database for all stroke patient data. With REDCap being HIPAA compliant and accessible via an API, we created a standardized data dictionary of all fields needed from the EHR. We then wrote SQL queries to pull all relevant information, validated query results, cleaned and prepped the import using R and RStudio, and automated the import using the REDCap API and Posit R Server environment. After the REDCap rollout, we had a standard database with automatic pre-population of data for 100% of stroke patients, standard workflow, and automatic email alerts to stakeholders. We were able to automate the process to run daily and upload over 120 variables, reducing manual data entry and the amount of time it takes to complete concurrent review of charts by 50%. The process changes culminated in a systemwide Power BI dashboard showing demographic distributions and improvements in stroke-related process and outcome metrics. The REDCap project has wider applications for other care areas, effectively showing how we can leverage open-source tools, analytics, and automation where applicable to allow employees to work at the top of their license and ultimately improve patient care."
#FAST #StrokeManagement #EHR #RStudio #healthdata #healthcaredata #healthcareanalytics #healthanalytics
