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Improving Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Discharge Timeliness of Infants with Bronchiolitis Using Clinical Decision
Blake Martin1,2, Brendan Mulhern3,4, Melissa Majors4
1Department of Pediatrics, Section of Critical Care, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, Colorado, United States.
Insights
A new clinical decision support (CDS) tool successfully reduced the time needed to transfer children out of the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). This electronic health record-based tool helps identify eligible patients faster, improving care efficiency.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Intensive Care
- Clinical Informatics
- Quality Improvement Initiatives
Background:
- Pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patient transfer requires efficient identification of suitable candidates.
- A prior quality improvement (QI) initiative aimed to expedite transfer evaluations for non-medically complex PICU patients with bronchiolitis.
- Manual tracking of patient respiratory support was a limitation in the previous initiative.
Purpose of the Study:
- To design and implement an electronic health record (EHR)-based clinical decision support (CDS) tool.
- To automate the identification of PICU patients ready for transfer.
- To further accelerate the transfer evaluation process initiated by the QI program.
Main Methods:
- Developed an EHR-based CDS tool to automatically identify patients meeting QI criteria.
- The tool alerts clinicians when patients have received floor-appropriate respiratory support for at least 6 hours.
- Compared time-to-transfer, PICU length of stay (LOS), and hospital LOS across pre-QI, QI, and CDS implementation phases.
Main Results:
- The CDS phase showed a significantly shorter median time-to-transfer (5.23 hours) compared to the QI phase (5.93 hours).
- PICU and hospital length of stay (LOS) decreased from the pre-QI to the QI phase.
- While LOS reductions were maintained in the CDS phase, further significant decreases were not observed.
Conclusions:
- An EHR-based CDS tool effectively adapted a QI initiative to expedite the identification of PICU patients for transfer.
- This automated approach allows PICU clinicians to focus on high-acuity tasks.
- The CDS tool facilitates timely transfer evaluations for appropriate pediatric patients.
Background:
Identifying children ready for transfer out of the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is an area that may benefit from clinical decision support (CDS). We previously implemented a quality improvement (QI) initiative to accelerate the transfer evaluation of non-medically complex PICU patients with viral bronchiolitis receiving floor-appropriate respiratory support.
Objectives:
Design a CDS tool adaptation of this QI initiative to further accelerate transfer evaluation of appropriate patients.
Methods:
The original initiative focused on identifying for transfer evaluation otherwise healthy children admitted to the PICU with bronchiolitis who had been receiving floor-appropriate levels of respiratory support for at least 6 hours. However, this initiative required that clinicians manually track the respiratory support of qualifying patients. We designed an electronic health record (EHR)-based CDS tool to automate identification of transfer-ready candidates. The tool parses EHR data to identify children meeting prior QI initiative criteria and alerts clinicians to assess transfer readiness once a child has been receiving floor-appropriate respiratory support for 6 hours. We compared time from reaching floor-appropriate support to placement of the transfer order ("time-to-transfer"), PICU length of stay (LOS), and hospital LOS between patients admitted prior to our QI initiative (December 1, 2018-October 19, 2019, "pre-QI phase"), during the initiative but before CDS tool implementation (October 20, 2019-February 7, 2022, "QI phase"), and after CDS implementation (February 8-November 11, 2022, "CDS phase").
Results:
CDS-phase patients (n = 131) had a shorter median time-to-transfer of 5.23 (interquartile range [IQR], 3.38-10.0) hours compared with QI-phase patients (n = 304) at 5.93 (IQR, 4.23-12.2) hours (p = 0.04). PICU and hospital LOS values decreased from the pre-QI (n = 150) to QI phase. Though LOS reductions were sustained during the CDS phase, further reductions from QI to CDS phase were not statistically significant.
Conclusion:
An EHR-based CDS adaptation of a prior QI initiative facilitated timely identification of PICU patients with bronchiolitis ready for transfer evaluation. Such tools might allow PICU clinicians to focus on other high-acuity tasks while accelerating transfer evaluation of appropriate patients.
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