Designing a modern behavioral health unit often means intentionally leaving out bedside phones – a standard fixture elsewhere in the hospital, but a safety and security concern in psychiatric care. But when patient’s can’t call in their own meal orders, what then? For UCHealth, that meant taking advantage of an technology that was not yet being used and changing their workflow to accommodate it. Better experiences and higher productivity were the result.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Jenna Sampson, Nutrition Systems Coordinator at UCHealth. When their new behavioral health unit came online, Sampson and her team had to rethink their organization’s standard phone-based meal ordering process, ultimately deploying an existing app.
What This Conversation Revealed
- Intentional constraints drive digital workflows. Behavioral health unites routinely exclude bedside phones for safety reasons and because of that UCHealth moved to meal ordering onto a mobile app which ended up being better for everyone.
- Safety requires strict EHR boundaries. To handle risky free-text allergies in Epic, the system implements a hard stop when allergies are found to be in free-text in the EHR. Nothing moves forward until those allergies are coded discretely into Epic.
- Frontline tools boost system metrics. Providing nurses with direct mobile access turned a potential chore into a preferred workflow, driving regional app adoption to record highs.
Building Patient Workflows Around Intentional Constraints
When UCHealth opened a new 55-bed behavioral health unit in Fort Collins, the facility featured a very specific design choice. The rooms intentionally lacked bedside phones. Standard practice across the health system relied on patients calling the kitchen to order their meals.
Without patient phones, the burden would fall entirely on the nursing staff to call in the orders. That alternative would have meant nurses calling orders into the call center which in turn would create longer wait times for other patients and bog down the call center with additional, unnecessary call volumes.
The solution was already in their technology stack – the Illumia (formerly CBORD) Patient App.
“We already had the Patient App,” shared Sampson. “We decided to explore it and made it successful.”
Giving nurses direct mobile access transformed the ordering process and avoided a massive call center bottleneck.
Baking Safety into the Epic Workflow
A major challenge in dietary ordering is handling allergies entered manually in the electronic health record. UCHealth uses Epic, which allows clinical staff to input allergies as free text in the “other allergy” field.
A free text entry like “strawberry”, for example, will not trigger the automated dietary compliance system, creating a serious patient safety risk. The team solved this by creating a new operational workflow. “Any patient that has [something entered into] the other allergy field are ineligible to order through the app to ensure patient safety,” shared Sampson. “When this happens, our staff go into Epic and codify the allergy properly and remove the data from the ‘other allergy’ field. Now that patient’s meals can be ordered through the app.”
The Bottom Line
Tying the mobile app directly to Epic’s allergy compliance engine ensures patient safety remains the top priority. While nurses initially had some resistance, they quickly came around – Sampson reports they now “fight over who gets to put the orders in.” The unit is inputting 99 percent of patient meal orders through the app. That localized success drove the region’s overall patient meal ordering from less than 1 percent to 19 percent. The unit also avoided adding a full FTE to the call center, translating to significant cost savings. The new unit is serving as a potential model for all other units at UCHealth.
What Healthcare IT Leaders Are Asking
How do you handle free-text food allergies in digital ordering?
Free text fields in an electronic health record fail to map to automated dietary compliance systems. The safest approach is to restrict digital meal ordering for any patient with an “other” allergy listed. Clinicians must manually review the chart and convert the free text into a coded, system-recognized allergy before the patient can use self-service apps.
What is the best way to drive clinical adoption of a mobile app?
Removing friction at the point of care is the fastest path to adoption. Pre-loading the required applications directly onto corporate-issued mobile devices ensures immediate access for nursing staff. When a tool genuinely saves time compared to calling a busy contact center, clinical teams will naturally gravitate toward it.
Can localized digital workflows impact system-wide metrics?
Testing a distinct workflow in a controlled environment provides a blueprint for broader rollouts. A near-perfect adoption rate in a single unit can generate enough volume to significantly move regional utilization metrics. This localized data serves as compelling proof to secure buy-in from other clinical departments.
Learn more about UCHealth at https://www.uchealth.org/
Learn more about Illumia at https://illumiatech.com/
Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.
And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.
Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.
No comments:
Post a Comment