Leveraging Existing Tools in Electronic Health Record Systems to Automate Clinical Registry Compilation

Clinical registries have proven beneficial by providing a resource to address research questions, monitor care, and identify suitable subjects for clinical studies. Despite a well-organized registry, population is often low because of the human capital required. The increasing prevalence of electronic medical health records provides the opportunity to integrate registry compilation into routine patient encounters. Here we describe how one tool existing within the Epic Medical Record software suite, Smart Phrases, can be adapted to automate population of a hearing loss patient registry. The usage rate of Smart Phrases was high and resulted in a significant reduction in the time burden associated with registry population. Use of Smart Phrases could become an important factor in the design of future registries that allow broad uptake and convenient data input.