Epic Clean Up
Your In Basket Is Less Cluttered
With clinicians and nurses feeling overwhelmed by their In Basket work, curiosity conquered the clutter.
Dr. Lynn McFarling, Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer, and Sandy Hamilton, Senior Application Systems Analyst, wondered two questions: How can we help clinicians manage their In Baskets; and, How are other organizations solving this problem?
Reports showed potentially millions of unnecessary In Basket messages.
The cleanup project began when Dr. McFarling and Sandy Hamilton attended several Epic webinars to learn how other organizations improved their In Baskets. In addition, Epic developed new tools that give our organization the ability to dig deeper into In Basket data. Analyzing the data was key to the project’s success. Reports showed that we had potentially millions of Epic In Basket messages that our organization likely didn’t need, some even dated as far back as 2007.
Epic’s In Basket is the communication hub that sends and receives secured messages and tasks. The 4 million messages in question were typically not unread, rather they were messages or tasks that were read and acted upon but never deleted, also called “done” in Epic terminology.
The task was to understand which messages could be deleted and which messages need to stay. “At first, we didn’t know where to start”, said Sandy. “It felt overwhelming because there were so many potential messages that we suspected could be removed but we didn’t want to risk legal issues if we removed them. That is why working with our Compliance team was so important.”
At first, we didn’t know where to start.
Sandy Hamilton
DR MCFARLING AND SANDY HAMILTON WORKED WITH FELLOW IS&T STAFF MEMBERS HEIDI ALBRECHT, DIRECTOR OF INFORMATICS, AMANDA FEDOR, DIRECTOR EHR APPLICATIONS, ASHLEY JUDE, MANAGER OF EPIC CLINICAL APPS, AND NICOLE VIRNIG, INFORMATICS NURSE TEAMED UP WITH SUE STEIN, COMPLIANCE MANAGER – PROFESSIONAL, LOIS SCHMITT, COMPLIANCE MANAGER – FACILITY/NURSING HOME, AND JESSICA TIMMER, COMPLIANCE ANALYST.
Four million messages have been deleted to date.
Together with an internal team from IS&T and Compliance, Dr. McFarling and Sandy were able to delete 4 million messages to date. They anticipate as many as 6 million more!
Compliance Manager Lois Schmitt attributes their success to remaining curious and teamwork. “Our compliance team needed to fully understand the Epic In Basket functions and then how to apply Federal and State rules & regulations to remain compliant. Initially, we spent a lot of time just asking each other questions. Once we understood each other’s goals, we were able to work together towards the solutions.”
Three additional strategies emerged.
The work didn’t stop with removing unwanted messages. The team prioritized three additional strategies:
- Identify In Basket workflows that could be standardized
- Create an In Basket policy
- Develop an In Basket dashboard.
The project team looks forward to the future. “It can be daunting for a staff member to see thousands of messages,” said Sandy Hamilton. “A clutter free In Basket will help our Epic users focus on messages that need their attention. In the future, approved message types will be automatically deleted after a designated amount of time. This is exciting for all Epic users and we are thrilled that IS&T can offer automated solutions.”