CCNC works to improve pediatric EHR functionality
Healthcare publications EHR Intelligence and Healthcare Informatics recently featured CCNC for discussing national efforts to enhancing pediatric functionality in electronic health record (EHR) systems. CCNC’s work under a national grant was in part to help the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) evaluate how EHRs might be improved in pediatric settings.
In conversation with EHR Intelligence, Kern Eason, program manager at CCNC, emphasized how EHR systems can be improved by better tailoring them to the needs of clinicians who care for children.
"We talked about social determinants of health,” said Eason. “How do you screen for that, and how do you deliver support for families around transportation and housing and other things that are a factor in care? EHR systems don’t have a good way of tracking referrals to community agencies around those types of concerns.”
In the article published by Healthcare Informatics, CCNC’s Dr. Marian Earls, deputy chief medical officer and pediatrician, spoke about the gaps in EHR systems and CCNC’s efforts to develop EHR vendor guidance, specifically around developmental and behavioral screening.
Too often pediatricians are doing “incredible workarounds” or entering patient data into the EHR system manually, Dr. Earls said. “The vendor guide was intended to be put out there so people would incorporate this information in a way that was more useful for the practice, and also would be something that would provide structured data.”
