Collaborate & Review Clinical Content

The goal with Plexina Central’s review board feature is to have clinicians engaged in the order set deployment process as they review clinical content. The idea is that as individuals tackle problems within an organization, they will be more efficient if they can share skills and knowledge with other specialized users.

Any organization’s business leaders will tell you that collaboration and interoperability between departments is a top priority; however, implementing the right tools to foster this collaborative environment is tricky. No two organizations are the same and while there are standards like meaningful use and ICD-10 to regiment aspects of clinical care, budgets, strategy, and company culture will always vary from clinic to clinic. With so much variability in organizations how can we foster communication to make an organization successful?

Emulate Existing Environments

Regardless of EHR or standards, organizations all have, to some degree, varying governance policies and entrenched ways of doing things. When we were building the Plexina Central web application we wanted to be sure that any change we introduced to an organization could be integrated relatively easily into previously existing work flows.

The common ground for most if not all order set development is the design view of the order set seen inside the EHR. We could liken this design view to a brand name that, due to popularity, becomes synonymous with the name of its product. A clinician in an Allscripts environment will think of an order set in the terms of the Allscripts SAC design view she sees it in; the same goes for TouchWorks, Enterprise EHR or any other clinical information system that gives a visual representation of an order set. Instead of trying to change the clinician’s concept of what an order set looks like, we emulate the design of the organization’s current system.

“Baylor clinicians are presented with order sets during development that look and feel like they appear in production, providing an efficient review and approval process for acquiring consensus on clinical content.”

Dr. Joseph Schneider Vice President & CMIO Baylor Health Care

Collaborative content reviews are able to show you your order sets in the same format you would see in your target system. Because we are keeping a level of familiarity between the order set design in the EHR and our tool, we’ve seen clinicians more engaged in the order set deployment process, which has translated to a high rate of adoption. Emulating the EHR design also helps smooth the transition of implementing the more powerful features of our tools.

Communication & Interoperability

Flexibility is important to us. In everything we build we want it to meet the most important needs of the client; this means the final product is lean, the content is robust, and the user interface is minimal. Plexina Central’s review board was designed to facilitate communication between departments in such a way that consensus can be built around evidence based medicine. We want to see your expert clinicians being able to share their current knowledge easily, so you can improve your order sets and yield better outcomes in patient care. Plexina Central’s review board can do this in a few ways.

You can assemble a peer group to review clinical content of any order set as it would appear in your target EHR. These review groups are able to provide feedback in the form of comments, add evidence sources, and tally votes for each item. Each order, order grouping, order item, item spec, and item attribute can be discussed and voted upon. All of this happens in real time via the cloud, allowing for quick consensus between reviewers from any desktop or mobile device.

Review documents created by an organization’s order set team are uploaded to Plexina Central for review. A head reviewer can moderate the entire review process, ensuring the productivity of the team. We keep reviewer engagement by notifying reviewers when necessary (we don’t want to ping your expert clinicians to death, we know they’re busy people) about important updates to the review. This results in more feedback, increased iterations of the deployed order set, and improved review cycle time.

Everything is interoperable. Our desktop software based product Plexina Studio interfaces with your EHR and builds order sets which are sent to Plexina Central for clinician review. The review feedback is sent directly to the clinical content team’s project and issue tracking application. The clinical content team can then make and deploy the requested changes or resend the content to a review. Essentially these modules create a feedback loop where development is always moving.

We’ve created Plexina Central’s review board tool to be as flexible as possible. Whether it needs to fit your organizations governance policy or interface with an existing EHR, our healthcare solutions can help your team review clinical content and add clinical decision support.