GE Healthcare (United Kingdom) is collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Public Health Informatics in a pilot project to notify physicians of urgent public health advisories, notifications and alerts. The company says the pilot project is designed to demonstrate the capability of a public health agency to utilize EMRs to provide clinicians with timely, patient-specific information at the point of care.
CDC routinely disseminates important health alerts, advisories and notifications — via e-mail and on the agency’s Web site — to public health practitioners and clinicians. The pilot program, the company says, will explore the feasibility of creating and integrating actionable alerts with its Centricity EMR system based on patient record content, using a standard messaging format.
GE says the project will determine the EMR’s ability to identify specific patients with risk factors related to the health condition identified in the alert, enabling clinicians to immediately act on the alerts by addressing the impacted patients. Additionally, it says the development of a feedback mechanism to capture the provider’s response will be explored.
