VQI & Epic Electronic Health Record Integration

New Developments - VQI Integrates with Epic EHR

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Dear VQI Providers:

We are pleased to inform you of an exciting new development in our efforts to integrate the Vascular Quality Initiative with the Epic electronic health record (EHR). Drs. Michael Stoner of the University of Rochester and Matthew Mell of Stanford University have developed a suite of Epic EHR note templates to expedite VQI data collection at the point of care. In collaboration with the Epic Systems Corporation, these templates have been made available in a format to allow direct importation into your hospital’s Epic EHR.

Once imported, the note templates provide structured documentation for collection of history, procedural and follow-up data points across the VQI modules. The immediate benefit of importing these into your system is that your data abstracter will know exactly where to look to find VQI data. This significantly reduces the amount of labor required for chart abstraction and is an important first step towards our ultimate goal of fully automated VQI data collection from the EHR.

The estimated effort for your informatics department to import and configure these note templates is less than eight hours. Ask your informatics colleagues to search the Epic UserWeb Community library for the “SmartTexts” listed below. They can directly import these using the “Community Library” feature of the Epic Management Console. Once imported into your system, you can work with your informatics staff to further customize these note templates to meet your site’s need. Because most Epic clients eventually post their content back to the Community Library, we ask that you keep “VQI” in the title of the “SmartText” so that others may find your modifications.

In addition to seeing these note templates on the Epic UserWeb, we have placed an index of available VQI smart text created by the University of Rochester on the VQI website so you may preview the content

Click Here to view the VQI Smart Text Index File

Again, I would like to thank Drs. Stoner and Mell as well as Lisa Spellman from The University of Rochester for the creation of this content. Your uptake of this innovation will represent a step forward in our quest to develop a fully automated chart abstraction system.

Thank you on behalf of the Epic-VQI integration task force.

Robert Steppacher, MD Chair   University of Chicago
Robert Feezor, MD   University of Florida
Joe Schneider, MD   Central DuPage
Nick Carruthers   Rhode Island Hospital
Matteo Verzola   Epic Systems Corporation
Michael Stoner, MD   University of Rochester
Mathew Mell, MD   Stanford University