Heart Failure Management Innovation Enabled by Electronic Health Records

Highlights

• Modern EHR provide many tools that can improve quality and efficiency of heart failure management, but these tools are underutilized.

• EHR tools can support remote patient engagement, effective documentation, multifaceted analytics, and point-of-care education and decision support.

• Close collaboration between clinicians and developers will increase awareness, convenience, use, and effectiveness of EHR tools, which in turn has the potential to revolutionize CHF care delivery and clinical research.

Abstract

Patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) require complex medical management across the continuum of care. Electronic health records (EHR) are currently used for traditional tasks of documentation, reviewing and managing test results, computerized order entry, and billing. Unfortunately many clinicians view EHR as merely digitized versions of paper charts, which create additional work and cognitive burden without improving quality or efficiency of care. In fact, EHR are revolutionizing the care of chronic diseases such as CHF. This review describes how appropriate use of technologies offered by EHR can help standardize CHF care, promote adherence to evidence-based guidelines, optimize workflow efficiency, improve performance metrics, and facilitate patient engagement. This review discusses a number of tools including documentation templates, telehealth and telemedicine, health information exchange, order sets, clinical decision support, registries, and analytics. Where available, evidence of their potential utility in management of CHF is presented. Together these EHR tools can also be used to enhance quality improvement, patient management, and clinical research as part of a learning health care system model. This review describes how existing EHR tools can support patients, cardiologists, and care teams to deliver consistent, high-quality, coordinated, patient-centered, and guideline-concordant care of CHF.