Integrating Pediatric Anesthesia Sustainability Metrics into Native Electronic Health Records: A Clinical Informatics...

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science in Healthcare
• Anesthesiology
• Pediatric Medicine

Background:

• Anesthetic gases contribute significantly to healthcare's greenhouse gas emissions.
• Pediatric anesthesia faces unique challenges compared to adult practices for sustainability.
• Third-party data applications for anesthesia records are expensive.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and implement pediatric-specific anesthesia sustainability metrics.
• To integrate these metrics into native electronic health record (EHR) systems.
• To enable real-time data capture and feedback for environmental benchmarking.

Main Methods:

• A nominal consensus group process identified 24 pediatric-focused sustainability metrics.
• Metrics were integrated into Epic's Anesthesia module for automated data collection.
• Interactive dashboards were created for department-wide and individual provider feedback.

Main Results:

• The study demonstrated the feasibility of creating novel pediatric-specific sustainability metrics.
• Automated data collection and feedback mechanisms were successfully implemented.
• The developed metrics can be used within EHRs to benchmark environmental goals.

Conclusions:

• Pediatric anesthesia sustainability metrics can be effectively designed and integrated into EHRs.
• Real-time data capture and feedback are achievable within native systems.
• This approach supports environmental goal setting and monitoring in pediatric anesthesia.