Configuring Epic Business Continuity Access: 5 Critical Downtime Reports
Downtime in Epic occurs for numerous reasons, planned or unplanned. Whether your organization needs the latest Special Update, or your server room is unexpectedly flooded, tension in your clinical practice will run a bit higher when Epic is down. This anxiety can lead to mistakes or preventable service desk calls.
You can reduce this worry by reviewing your Business Continuity Access (BCA) configuration. You should plan to deliver reports to your departments or service lines that are both succinct and clinically relevant to the consumers. Epic provides recommendations on certain types of reports to consider, and this article will look to expound on those recommendations.
To best prepare your BCA configuration during uptime an analyst should understand each report type and how the information output affects clinical workflow, so that during downtime, only need-to-know information is delivered.
Here are some important report types to consider mapping to your procedural areas.
Department Appointment Report (DAR)
This report is an essential component of a successful BCA configuration. It should paint a complete clinical picture of the scheduled appointments for the configured date range.
An analyst should understand what is important for each department. Does the department need to know a patient’s BMI prior to scanning, pregnancy/OBGYN status, or metallic implants? Consider including these values in your report’s display output.
Depending on department volumes and the number of display columns included, this report output can be lengthy. Design your report to maximize the amount of horizontal real estate per appointment by limiting the number of rows, then fine-tuning column widths per row. (For example, “accession number” should not take up half a row!) Additionally, be cognizant of oversaturating a department with clinical information that isn’t relevant to the scan type.
Schedule Orders Report (SOR)
The goal of this report is to provide your procedural departments everything they need to know quickly to begin scanning stat exams, as well as to equip them for planning inpatient exams as time allows. First and foremost, consider what your department needs per scan type for patient safety concerns. Include columns that detail the ordering provider and/or ordering department’s phone or pager number for quicker turnaround time when questions need answered.
Additionally, if your departments wish to have a more complete clinical history depending on patient class, you can create different SORs that pull orders placed in the ED and your inpatient areas. Each of these reports can then utilize tailored display outputs relevant for the patient class.
Protocol Report
If your site uses Epic for protocolling studies prior to the appointment, consider creating an LRP report containing Epic-released or custom print groups that display protocol...
