IS Update: PEPL System Improves Patient Safety
The Partners Enterprise Patient List (PEPL), which rolled out across BWH throughout the past year, is providing a unified system for assigning and discovering each inpatient’s primary responding clinician—the physician, physician assistant, nurse midwife or nurse practitioner who can quickly take action to treat a patient for an urgent issue at the bedside or in response to a critical alert.
Since the completion of the roll-out, coverage rates of inpatients by a PEPL-identified responding clinician have consistently exceeded 90 percent. This rapid adoption of the system as the means to document patient coverage demonstrates the commitment of clinical staff to patient safety.
The PEPL team has received enthusiastic feedback from physicians, nursing and clinical services, reporting that it is much easier for them to easily and quickly identify and contact a patient’s doctor. In response to feedback and suggestions from current users and potential future PEPL users, the BWH Clinical Systems Team is actively pursuing enhancements of “Care Team” functionality in PEPL to facilitate multidisciplinary communication and care coordination. The PEPL system represents an important foundational step in the creation of a care team-based communication tool at BWH, and it will enable the expansion of automated services delivering patient-specific data directly to the responding clinician for immediate action. The system will also facilitate patient list functionality across clinical systems, allowing staff to better integrate information and workflow across those systems.
Questions and suggestion regarding the PEPL software or BWH Responding Clinician Program can be submitted to IS staff via the “Feedback” button in the PEPL product.