College of Computing & Informatics

Jacob Williamson

College of Computing & Informatics Computer Science

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Aleksandra Sarcevic Information Science

Leah Kulp Co-Mentor

Development of a Tool for Organizing Pre-hospital Information

Trauma resuscitations occur in a fast-paced setting where minor errors can have significant consequences. An important aspect of patient care includes a transfer of information from the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) team to the trauma team about patient injuries and en-route treatments. To ensure efficient care, team leaders use a checklist. In this project, we aim to support the pre-hospital information transfer through the use of the checklist.

We first analyzed leaders’ notes in the margins of 221 paper and 115 digital checklists to inform the design of a tool for organizing the pre-hospital report. This analysis showed that leaders record seven information types: demographics, injury mechanism, injury types, symptoms, treatments, medical history, and arrival details. We then designed two prototypes and evaluated them with three team leaders. We found that leaders preferred an adaptive design with adjustable options based on previous selections. The revised prototype allows for quick data entry by selecting a set of information items that best describe the patient status upon arrival to the hospital. The next steps include developing a functional prototype and testing it before a future deployment at the hospital.

College of Computing & Informatics

Victoria Young

College of Computing & Informatics

Computer Science

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Aleksandra Sarcevic

Information Science

Swathi Jagannath Co-Mentor

Electronic Documentation Efficiency and Accuracy in Medical Resuscitations

Electronic Health Records (EHR) play a key role in care continuity and decision making by keeping a record of a patient’s hospital visit. Due to their time-critical nature, resuscitation settings in emergency departments have not fully adopted electronic flowsheets. This work examines temporal aspects of documentation in the electronic flowsheet at our research site and identifies delayed and missed entries, and free-text field (FTF) usage. We used video recordings of 58 resuscitations and timestamped the verbal reports from team members about activity completion. We compared the video timestamps to actual timestamps in EHRs to identify information that was recorded before verbal reports, in near real time, or in a delayed manner. We found that only 13% of the documentation occurs in near real time (within two minutes of the verbal reports). We examined the FTFs and found that most entries were recorded within the first 20 minutes of the resuscitation. FTFs were used as a key mechanism for data entry and substituted formal recording into the respective sections as activities occurred more rapidly. We next aim to recommend improvements to the current EHR design to support real-time documentation during resuscitations.