Informatics

In 2011, the University of Rochester Medical Center installed Epic Corporation’s electronic health record (EHR) for both the inpatient and ambulatory setting. If you visit, you will hear it referred to as eRecord, the University’s branded version of Epic’s software.  It wasn’t until May of 2015, that the perioperative OpTime module, including Epic’s anesthesia module, was implemented allowing device integration for automatically charting vitals and other physiologic parameters. We are very proud of the workflows we have in our department that are supported by this software, taking advantage of macros, reminders, best practice alerts and close encounter checks to create a simple, compliant anesthesia record. We often hear from newly hired staff how easy it is to learn, and from staff that trained or worked elsewhere, how much we have made the computer work for us. As of the summer of 2022, we have 7 hospital systems in the area using our eRecord anesthesia workflows.

We are very privileged to have a member of our department sit on the adult anesthesia steering board at Epic to push further development of the platform. Dr. Stephen Breneman has been on the board almost four years. As a board-certified Clinical Informaticist, he is aware of the growing need to use the information gathered through routine care to provide better care of the next patient or next anesthetic on the same patient. He co-chairs the anesthesia reporting subcommittee at Epic and is a member of the preoperative assessment subcommittee as well.

While the University does not have a Department of Informatics, it does have an influential informatics committee infrastructure run by an orthopedic surgeon as Chief Medical Informatics Officers, Gregg Nicandri, M.D. and a committed  group of clinical informaticists. For much larger dataset analyses, “Big Data”, Dr. Laurent Glance is a highly recognized member of this department in outcomes research.  This year we had our first anesthesia resident participate in a Digital Health Innovations course run out of the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Breneman was one of the lecturers.  Per the Dean, the plan is to create a Center for Clinical Informatics in the next few years and hopefully create a full fellowship in clinical informatics to which our department would be committed.