EHR Software Implementation Expected To ‘Structure Information Bits'

By Julia Ernst, contributing writer

Silver Hill Hospital will utilize the software for data collection and ‘at-a-glance’ display capabilities.

Silver Hill Hospital, a mental health hospital in Connecticut, has adopted EHR augmentation software from QPID Health. The software will allow the hospital to capture clinically relevant information and provide a forum for “at-a-glance” display of data.

In addition to the EHR augmentation software, the venture will provide a behavioral health portal with the use of QPID Health’s Cohort App. The Cohort App will allow Silver Hill Hospital to identify and collect information across various groups of patients.

The QPID platform will allow Silver Hill Hospital to gather data for the purposes of tracking compliance and quality metrics that relate to hospital-based inpatient psychiatric services, a program that is specifically geared toward the safety of psychiatric patients. The hospital has said the software will “help it maximize EHR data and spot patterns for improved treatment on the psychiatric side, which has been a growing focus as the health system as a whole looks to curb hospitalizations.”

According to Dr. Sigurd Ackerman, president and medical director of Silver Hill Hospital, “We still have a big problem that most hospitals of every kind have – much of the information in the EHR is text. It’s not structured information bits. And so even though we can put the text into the EHR, up until now there has been no way to survey that information and retrieve that information.”

The new software from QPID will allow the hospital to retrieve data that is tailored to specific psychiatric needs.

“If we want to know how many patients were discharged on anti-psychotic drugs, we can do that in the blink of an eye versus hour and hours,” Dr. Ackerman said. “Another way in which it’s helpful for us as a hospital: We have our own questions we’d like to address because it helps us with treatment planning. If we want to query three years’ worth of medical records and see if there’s something that needs a clinical solution, we can do that now because we can enter the question we’re asking and extract the data.”

QPID Health began as an informatics initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2005. Clinical rollout began in 2007 and the company launched in late 2012. Silver Hill Hospital is an academic affiliate of Yale University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry located on a 42-acre campus in New Canaan, CT that includes 14 buildings.

Source: MedCity News