Patient experience leader Press Ganey has taken its partnership with electronic health record (EHR) giant Epic a step further, announcing a new integration focused on automating the reporting of crucial nursing-related safety data.
This development, unveiled on Monday, leverages Press Ganey’s National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI). The NDNQI offers a comprehensive resource for nursing leaders, allowing them to benchmark their teams’ performance on over 600 distinct measures. These measures are gleaned from the administrative documentation and medical records of more than 2,000 participating healthcare organizations.
The NDNQI’s integration with Epic’s EHR platform marks a significant step towards streamlining data collection and reporting. Initially, the integration will automate the reporting of five key indicators: catheter-associated urinary tract infections, central line bloodstream infections, inpatient falls, outpatient falls, and pressure injuries.
“Our expanded collaboration with Epic to integrate reporting of nursing sensitive indicators is a pivotal step towards using real-time data to improve the experience and quality of care,” stated Darren Dworkin, Press Ganey’s President and Chief Operating Officer, in a press release. “By removing manual reporting of quality and safety data, we can reduce work for nursing leaders and speed up the time to insight and action.”
While the announcement did not specify a precise timeline for the integration’s launch or mention the potential inclusion of additional indicators in the future, it highlighted the broader context of the collaboration. This NDNQI integration builds upon a partnership announced just over a year ago, which focused on incorporating Press Ganey’s patient experience data directly into Epic’s vast patient record system, encompassing over 300 million individuals.
This prior initiative, one among several third-party co-development partnerships listed under the “Workshop” section of Epic’s recently redesigned Showroom website, empowers healthcare organizations that utilize both Epic and Press Ganey to surface patient experience metrics and insights directly within staff workflows. Both companies emphasized the role of Epic Users Group Meeting workshops held over the past year in guiding their co-development efforts.
“The new integration technologies developed in Workshop will allow nurse leaders to devote more time to acting on data, with an aim to ultimately enhance the quality of care,” commented Emily Barey, Epic’s Vice President for Nursing, in a press release. “This collaboration intends not only to reduce the amount of required abstracting and formatting but also ensure that documentation supports the essential work of nurses in keeping patients safe.”
It’s important to note that Press Ganey is not the sole player offering patient experience data integration with Epic’s systems. In December of last year, Qualtrics announced a similar integration designed to flag relevant, data-based insights for healthcare providers and frontline staff utilizing the Epic platform.
This evolving landscape of data integration within EHR systems holds tremendous potential for streamlining nursing workflows, improving data accuracy, and ultimately enhancing patient safety and overall healthcare quality.
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