News: EHR integration leads to higher documentation of care goals, study finds

An EHR integration tool (Jumpstart) that pushes goals-of-care guides to patients and their clinicians, leads to a higher documentation of care goals, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open.

The study included 150 patients, from two facilities, who were either hospitalized with chronic life-limiting illness (aged 65 or older) or had markers of fragility (aged 80 years or older).

Patients in the study and their clinicians received goals-of-care guides with data from questionnaires and the EHR designed to prompt conversations about care goals. The study found that those patients who received the goals-of-care guide pushes had higher accounts of EHR-documented discussions about their care goals (as compared to the control group who did not receive such discussion prompts).

“This milieu is likely to magnify previously described discrepancies between patient-reported, clinician-reported, and EHR-documented goals-of-care discussions in outpatient settings and may also pose challenges in measuring the quality of communication during hospitalizations,” the study authors noted.

Being this was a pilot study with a limited number of patients, authors also note that additional evidence is needed to determine effectiveness of similar communication-priming interventions.

Editor’s note: The JAMA Network Open study can be found here.