A Bespoke Electronic Health Record for Epilepsy Care (EpiToMe): Development and Qualitative Evaluation

While electronic health records (EHR) bring various benefits to health care, EHR systems are often criticized as cumbersome to use, failing to fulfill the promise of improved health care delivery with little more than a means of meeting regulatory and billing requirements. EHR has also been recognized as one of the contributing factors for physician burnout.

Specialty-specific EHR systems have been suggested as an alternative approach that can potentially address challenges associated with general-purpose EHRs. We introduce the Epilepsy Tracking and optimized Management engine (EpiToMe), an exemplar bespoke EHR system for epilepsy care. EpiToMe uses an agile, physician-centered development strategy to optimize clinical workflow and patient care documentation. We present the design and implementation of EpiToMe and report the initial feedback on its utility for physician burnout.

Using collaborative, asynchronous data capturing interfaces anchored to a domain ontology, EpiToMe distributes reporting and documentation workload among technicians, clinical fellows, and attending physicians. Results of documentation are transmitted to the parent EHR to meet patient care requirements with a push of a button. An HL7 (version 2.3) messaging engine exchanges information between EpiToMe and the parent EHR to optimize clinical workflow tasks without redundant data entry. EpiToMe also provides live, interactive patient tracking interfaces to ease the burden of care management.

Since February 2019, 15,417 electroencephalogram reports, 2635 Epilepsy Monitoring Unit daily reports, and 1369 Epilepsy Monitoring Unit phase reports have been completed in EpiToMe for 6593 unique patients. A 10-question survey was completed by 11 (among 16 invited) senior clinical attending physicians. Consensus was found that EpiToMe eased the burden of care documentation for patient management, a contributing factor to physician burnout.

EpiToMe offers an exemplar bespoke EHR system developed using a physician-centered design and latest advancements in information technology. The bespoke approach has the potential to ease the burden of care management in epilepsy. This approach is applicable to other clinical specialties.