Background: In Hospital Medicine, triaging a patient is the process of evaluating an admitted patient and assigning the patient to an appropriate service. Triaging patients is a manual and challenging process which burdens Hospitalists. As with any manual process, there is an inherent risk of missed steps, and in the case of patient triage, the potential for adverse safety events. At the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Division of Hospital Medicine (DoHM) faculty are the primary attendings for over 30 unique service-lines across a campus spanning over 5 hospitals. As previously described by Patel et al[1], triaging responsibilities are rotated each day, with each service line being associated with various changing census caps, geographic locales, and clinical conditions. The electronic health record (EHR) can be used to minimize manual work, drastically reduce the risk of safety events, and improve situational awareness of patient flow and operations.
Purpose: The purpose of our project is to develop a triage tool within the EHR to provide hospitalists with real-time information to optimally assign patients to inpatient services.
Description: The Triage Dashboard is a custom dashboard activity within Epic® Hyperspace, utilizing real-time reports, hyperlinks to external sources, as well as external web resources reflecting shift assignments directly from the scheduling portal. Each component (Figure 1) serves a unique function, identifying potentially unassigned patients, displaying active census and pending discharges, pending admissions and transfers, patient/provider location assignments, and identifying patients on multiple attending service lines. Each component’s associated report automatically refreshes at a preset time period to reflect the most up-to-date information.
Conclusions: Since the introduction of the Triage Dashboard, DoHM faculty have utilized its functions in daily operations. A query of 3 month utilization showed the dashboard was viewed over 1000 times, for a daily rate of 11 times per day. As reference there are three triage shifts in a 24 hour period. Due to the dashboard’s inclusion within the EHR, there was notable improved provider satisfaction and efficiency.
