Making Electronic Health Records More Efficient

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Six years ago, radiologist Michael Zalis found himself spending a lot of time logging in and out of separate electronic health records at Massachusetts General Hospital to gather lab data, clinical notes, and other non-imaging information scattered in multiple databases. “Clinicians face this every day,” says Zalis, who quantified the frequency of EHR use to interpret CT scans and MRIs, and published his findings in the American Journal of Roentgenology. “It takes hours to manually pull together information, and clinicians are under pressure to get the information they need.”

Zalis co-founded and wrote the code for QPID, which stands for Queriable Patient Inference Dossier, a natural language search tool that extracts relevant clinical information from an EHR. Since its inception in Mass General’s radiology department, QPID has grown by word of mouth, and is now deployed across Boston-based Partners HealthCare, which includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It is used by 5,000 clinicians in 15 departments, such as gastroenterology, anesthesia, and surgery. QPID registers an average 5 million search requests a month. “We struck a nerve,” says Zalis.