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The adult and pediatric emergency departments will go live with Epic ASAP on Aug. 6. ASAP is the Epic application designed specifically for emergency medicine and has been successfully deployed at Howard County General, Sibley Memorial and Suburban hospitals. Implementation of ASAP will result in a number of work flow changes for the inpatient units. It is important for everyone to be prepared for this transition, since The Johns Hopkins Hospital will not go live with the rest of the Epic inpatient suite—orders, clinical documentation, perioperative, anesthesia, cardiology, radiology, oncology and transplant applications—until summer 2016.
Purpose
The decision to go live with ASAP ahead of the rest of the hospital was made for several reasons. First and foremost, when the emergency departments upgraded their registration system from Epic 99 to Prelude, there were significant problems operating their current HMED system in the new environment. While most of those issues have been resolved, it was felt that converting to ASAP ahead of schedule would provide the Emergency Department with a more stable system. In addition, it affords the unique opportunity to promote integrated care for patients presenting to the Emergency Department who have previously been seen in Johns Hopkins Health System ambulatory settings, all of which are now live on Epic's ambulatory suite.
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Deployment of the Epic ASAP application will offer many advantages to the Emergency Department and also to the rest of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. For the adult and pediatric emergency department staff members and providers, benefits of ASAP include greater flexibility in how to view charts, along with robust order sets, clinical decision support, best practice advisories and many documentation and efficiency tools. For the rest of the inpatient clinical community, the primary benefit will be increased access to a patient's medical course. With Epic read-only access, users of Johns Hopkins Hospital legacy systems will have the patient's entire course of care across the Johns Hopkins Health System available to them. Sunrise users without Epic read-only access will still be able to view an Emergency Department summary report, in a manner similar to the way they currently access the HMED report.
Plan
Since the emergency departments are going live ahead of the rest of the hospital, the Epic project team created many interfaces between Epic and the inpatient legacy systems. Sunrise users will exchange immunization information with Epic and will be able to view the Emergency Department summary in Sunrise. Our complex patient movement work flows have been redesigned to provide seamless transitions of care.
Your Part
If you don't already have access to Epic, you need to take the Epic View Only eLearning module, which can be accessed here. Epic now contains a vast amount of clinical information that is not available in Sunrise or EPR. Also, increased familiarity gained with the Epic system will prepare you to knowledgably participate in the collaborative academic medical center build with Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and the Community Division, which will begin this fall. Be assured that the implementation of Epic ASAP brings us one step closer to our goal of ensuring safe, coordinated care with "one patient, one record" across the entire Johns Hopkins Health System enterprise.
Thank you in advance for your support in making this transition a success for The Johns Hopkins Hospital!
Peter M. Hill, M.D., M.S.
Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs
Clinical Director
Director of Observation Services
Department of Emergency Medicine
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Stephanie S. Poe, D.N.P., M.Sc.N., R.N.-B.C.
Chief Nursing Information Officer, Johns Hopkins Health System
Director of Nursing Clinical Quality and Informatics
The Johns Hopkins Hospital
Peter Greene, M.D.
Chief Medical Information Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine |
