The VA Provider Digital Health (DHC) Committee meets monthly; members work to identify digital changes that would be most helpful to providers. VPSA provides sessional funding to the nine physician representatives on the committee for time spent in meetings and doing other committee work. The following is a summary of the committee’s July 9th meeting.
Telephone and verbal orders
Members of the Nursing Professional Practice team gave an update on refreshing the telephone and verbal orders guideline. A new regional guideline has been drafted to provide support to nurses and providers to navigate this area of practice. The guideline has been reviewed and revised with support from provider champions.
It will be submitted for a regional review process. As part of that process, this guideline will go through the Pharmacy and Therapeutics community as it has to do with medications specifically. Education and implementation planning will follow.
Inter-team communication – Provider perspective
Committee members discussed two issues:
- Should we leverage Team Communication for inpatient areas?
- What should be included in Team Communication?
Regarding the first area, the setup needs to be correct. We need to ensure day sheet view and worksheet view have a prominent action column. This tool should only be used for low-urgency communication; more discussion is needed to determine this scope. There are concerns that if this is used to convey important clinical information, it could be missed entirely. The committee would like to continue to develop this and create robust guidelines.
Regarding what should be included in Team Communication, the committee believes messaging should be categorized into two major buckets: urgent/semi-urgent and non-urgent. Education should be given to providers and to nursing staff because this is a passive communication method. Refined criteria along with communication and education materials will be developed and given to the committee for feedback.
Clinical documents distributing to Patient Portal
The CST Cerner Patient Portal will go live this fall. Widespread communication about the portal will begin in August and additional engagement will occur at department and division meetings.
Next meeting
The committee meets again on September 17. If you have an item you wish to be brought forward at one of these meetings, please contact Manager, Provider Strategic Initiatives & Engagement, Laura Mc Evoy.