Building Back Better: Applying Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic to Expand Critical Information Access

Schwartz, Hope E.M.; Stark, Nicholas R.; Sowa, Cathleen S.; Singh, Malini K.; Peabody, Christopher R.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented volume of evolving clinical guidelines that strained existing clinical information systems and necessitated rapid innovation in Emergency Departments (EDs). OBJECTIVES: Our team aimed to harness new COVID-19-related reliance on digital clinical support tools to re-envision the storage of and access to all clinical guidelines in our ED. METHODS: We used a design-thinking approach including empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping and testing to develop a low-cost, homegrown clinical information hub: E*Drive. To measure impact, we compared web traffic on E*Drive to our legacy cloud-based folder system and conducted a survey of end-users with a validated health technology utilization instrument. RESULTS: Our final product, E*Drive, is a centralized clinical information hub storing everything from clinical guidelines to discharge resources. Clinical guidelines are standardized and housed within the high-traffic E*Drive platform to increase accessibility. Since launch, E*Drive has averaged 84 unique weekly users, compared to <1 weekly user on the legacy system. We surveyed 52 clinicians for a total response rate of 47%. Prior to the E*Drive rollout 12.5% of ED clinicians felt confident accessing clinical information on the legacy system, while 76.6% of ED clinicians felt they could more easily access clinical information using E*Drive. CONCLUSION: The COVID pandemic revealed vulnerabilities within our information dissemination system and presented an opportunity to improve clinical information delivery. Centralized web-based clinical information hubs designed around the clinician end-user experience can increase clinical guideline access in the ED.