Digital Minute: Epic In Basket Efficiency Updates

By Walter Reiling, MD, system chief medical information officer, Premier Health; and Mandy Via, system director of access, referral management, and telehealth, Premier Health

One of the areas many of our providers spend significant time on is managing the basket within the Epic EMR. There are many reasons for this, including the volume of legitimate messages we must manage as part of caring for our patients. We also hear a lot of complaints that some of the time and energy is spent with messages that add little to no value to patient care.

This has been an area of focus nationally over the past year or two. To make things easier for our Premier Health users, we partnered with Epic on an In basket efficiency program. We have incorporated lessons learned by other Epic organizations with feedback from our Premier Health internal stakeholders to reduce those low-value messages. Several steps were taken as of Jan. 6 that should be noticeable over the coming weeks.

First, the messages that our PCP community receives from patient encounters outside of our organization were assessed. We will continue to get notified when a patient is admitted to the acute care environment or discharged from a local emergency department. However, messages indicating that a patient was seen in an ambulatory office will be discontinued. Our feedback was that these messages were seldom valuable in real-time. Those visits will still be recorded and visible in Chart Review and Care Everywhere as before.

Secondly, we have evaluated the likelihood of various message types being useful after a long time has passed. Many of our message types will now "expire" after a period of time, typically three to 12 months, and be removed from your In Basket. The associated actions and content will continue to live in Epic, but the messages will no longer be in the In Basket folder. The In Basket expiration details were distributed via email to the inpatient medical staff and are available from the ESS teams in the offices.

As always, you may get information and assistance from our ESS team and our technical education training staff. You may also reach out to me with questions at wareiling@premierhealth.com or Dr. David Cha, our associate CMIO, at dcha@premierhealth.com.

Back to the January 2025 issue of Premier Pulse