An electronic medical record project built by a graduate student in health informatics in the School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI is currently being tested by Franciscan Health for use in its nurse simulation lab.
Ashley Leising, who is employed by Franciscan Alliance in Beech Grove as an information services educator while she works on her master’s degree, has also been invited to deliver a presentation about her project at the annual Epic XGM conference in May.
Leising gained an understanding of the electronic medical record design, build and structure features, as well as security and confidentiality, in her health informatics courses.
The simulation lab, where nurse training is conducted, is commonly used in teaching hospitals such as Franciscan. Participants have the opportunity for hands-on experience with medical procedures before interacting with live patients.
Conversely, electronic medical record training is typically given in a classroom environment. Based on her experience, Leising recognized that nurses did not have adequate preparation for documenting care during an actual patient procedure.
Using her informatics skills, Leising worked with the simulation lab supervisor and staff to develop and integrate training modules for patient code, stroke and adverse reactions to chemotherapy. She then evaluated nurses’ simulation performance with and without the aid of the electronic medical records and then compared results from pre- and post-training. The electronic medical record training reduced the time the nurse needed to interact with the electronic medical record and allowed them to provide better patient care, making them more efficient, Leising said.
As a result of her work, Leising was invited to present her project to the Franciscan annual nursing practice showcase and to the chief information officer at Franciscan. She also submitted her project proposal to Epic, the emergency medical record provider, which resulted in her project being one of 74 submissions chosen to be presented to 40 organizations from across the country.
Leising’s project results have sparked an initiative within Franciscan Health to standardize and expand electronic medical records training and simulation integration throughout Franciscan’s 13 hospitals.
