Research Enhancements with Epic and CRMS

 If a research patient is seen in the emergency department, how will a physician know that the patient is on an investigational drug?  How will the study team know that their patient had a serious adverse event? 

Investigators, has this happened to one of your patients?

With the integration of the Clinical Research Management System (CRMS) and the new Epic system, patient safety and trial management will be improved in many ways, including research patient identifiers, system alerts, research scheduling, reporting, billing and compliance management, and much more. 

Epic and CRMS will be interfaced, so that once you log your research participant in CRMS, Epic will automatically update the eMR to reflect the patients’ study associations.  Once identified as a research participant in Epic, you can:

Improved Patient Care & Satisfaction

Streamlined Study Coordination

1)       See which patient is in what study in the eMR header, with a link to study info and contacts.  

2)        Flagging an order as research-related, which will be visible to benefit other clinicians when they view the patient’s chart. 

3)       Be automatically notified should one of your study patients be seen in the ED, or admitted as an inpatient.*

4)       Monitor characteristics across certain patient populations, or the enterprise at large, by building clinical registries.*†

5)       Communicate with participants, and/or gather patient reported outcomes via e-questionnaire, via MyChart.*

6)       Jump directly to the patient’s chart through custom reports you create based on study participation.†

7)       See all upcoming appointments for your study patient, and filter based on whether it’s study-related or not.

8)       Schedule a research visit and/or procedures using a customizable preference lists.  (And flag as research-related for clinicians to see.)

9)       Check availability for study scheduling by viewing any Departments’ scheduling calendars.  Utilize dedicated research schedulers, who will be able to schedule research visits across all departments, not just their own.

10)  [Less stress]
          + [Better research]
   = [Happier researchers & participants]    ;-)
 

 * Functionality may initially be explored as a pilot at go-live, or be planned for the optimization phase.
 Some functionality will likely require IRB approval.  


Regardless of your clinic’s roll-out schedule, your research participants will be going live in Epic on April 4, 2013 If you are not using CRMS, now is the time to add your study and participant data so that you will have access to this functionality in Epic!