Milwaukee’s New EHR Delivers Better Patient Care
Success StoriesThe City of Milwaukee Health Department is putting Public Health Infrastructure Grant Funding (PHIG) funding to work by launching a new Electronic Health Record (EHR), Ocean Epic. This new system makes the department more efficient, improves patient care, and provides a more complete picture of population health in Milwaukee. For example, the EHR reduces paperwork and administrative burden for managers and catches reporting or documentation errors before they happen. The helps prevent billing errors and ensures providers have an up-to-date record of the patient’s medical history and services they received previously. The EHR also gives direct service providers at the health department a more holistic picture of a patient’s health, which helps them connect patients to other services and resources that will help them live their healthiest lives.
Dominique Hyatt-Oates, Deputy Commissioner at the City of Milwaukee Health Department, explains how bringing multiple programs’ data into one system — from Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention to Breast and Cervical Cancer Awareness — is giving the department a fuller, more comprehensive picture of community health. This gives the department the health data it needs to look upstream, working at a community level to address the root causes of health problems and reduce the need for individual treatment.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you transforming the way patient records are managed?
As a health department, sometimes we can be one of the first touchpoints that patients have with Western medicine. We’ve seen patients come in from other countries for immunizations where their health record and their immunization records are on tattered paper, they’re in a folder, they’re in an envelope – and we’re able to take that information and document it within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) that can be referenced in future appointments by other practitioners.
Ocean Epic is an Electronic Health Record that allows us to document patient care. Anytime you go in for an appointment with a healthcare practitioner, they will have to document the care that they provide. We’re all documenting the care that we provide, and when we are all utilizing the same Electronic Health Record, we’re able to better share the information that we collect so that we can holistically provide care to that patient.
Which programs use this electronic health record (EHR)?
The programs that use the Electronic Health Record within the health department are our programs that provide patient services. This includes our Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention program, our Breast and Cervical Cancer Awareness program, our Empowering Families of Milwaukee program, and a few others.
How is the EHR improving efficiency?
A lot of the work that we’re able to streamline with a new Electronic Health Record would fall on the hands of the manager. The manager was responsible for reporting out on deliverables, gathering data, and reporting out on data. The EHR itself lessens the load because it already has templates, flow sheets, and processes built in that we can just adopt. It’s a large resource with multiple mini resources built in that can make one’s job significantly easier.
How does this improve patient care?
In public health, we’ve always been in a position of patient advocacy and empowerment, and by bringing on the Electronic Health Record, we have already seen stories of how we have improved healthcare for the patients. For example, we’ve resolved issues where a patient had multiple health records open because of a hyphenated last name or multiple last names, surnames, things of that nature. We’ve seen how that led to issues with their care or financial implications. One of the things that we’ve been able to see so far in our use of the Electronic Health Record is preventing billing errors for patients, preventing documentation errors, and catching when we do have errors so that they can be corrected. It also helps the patient understand the healthcare system in general, because we’re able to see them beyond just what they’re coming into the office for. The EHR gives a more holistic picture of their health and helps us guide them to whatever services are needed to continue them down this healthy journey.
How is the EHR helping you better understand community needs?
The standard and the dream is to always provide preventative, upstream public healthcare, care that is collaborative, care that looks at the whole patient. And with an Electronic Health Record, we’re able to do so because we’re communicating with one another. It’s not just the interdisciplinary team within the healthcare system, but now it’s the interdisciplinary team within the community. We are able to take that direct patient care, that direct service, and compile that with all the other direct patient services that we provide to tell a larger story through the data that we collect on the health of our community as a whole.