Patient-centered EHR Teaches Students the Technology and the Gravity of Pharmacy

AACP Article

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Pharmacy faculty are using an innovative EHR that gives students more than an education, it gives them practice. With this new applied teaching tool, students are no longer handed a paper case with a paragraph synopsis, but must search the educational medical record, read notes, look at lab work and piece the patient puzzle together. Cases become as multifaceted as individuals and the material resonates with students because it circles back to why they chose pharmacy—to help people.

This learning platform, called EHR Go, is used in all years of pharmacy education as a hands-on teaching tool. “It’s like a virtual grand rounds every day in pharmacy class,” said Kathleen Annala, CEO and President of Archetype Innovations, LLC, creators of EHR Go. Students work up diverse patient cases. Photographs bring patients to life and give students the sensation, ‘This is a real person.’ Faculty can be creative with their teaching and the platform helps them personalize care simulations.

As a professor, Annala saw her students were always looking for that human connection. She wove her experience as a nurse into her lessons, not just teaching the physiology of a burn, per se, but sharing the story of a little boy in the foster care system who got burned playing with a barbeque lighter. “When you bring that holistic way of seeing the world into the classroom, it makes the content go from dry and clinical to a very human, understandable experience where the numbers matter because this little boy is in pain,” Annala said. “Students immediately take the case more seriously, they start engaging with the material, and when done through EHR Go, it becomes all the more realistic.”

Educational EHRs have elevated case-based learning and Annala has played a part in its progression since its conception. She moved into education early on in her nursing career and because she was young, it was presumed she was a technology whiz. Nearly 20 years ago, she was handed a project to bring a computerized electronic health record system into the curricula for healthcare students. She saw the vision for EHR Go then, she saw the educational EHR should be the center of case-based learning and interprofessional education, just as a person should be the center of a case study.

Barriers—institutional, technological and financial — stopped Annala’s vision from fully coming to fruition while she was a teaching faculty. In 2008, she took a leap with her business partner and husband, Don Annala, to create the ultimate educational EHR, the one she originally envisioned, the one that has evolved into EHR Go, the only educational EHR tailored to pharmacy and interprofessional education.

“Where EHR education began was to teach the EHR as a technology itself without cases. I think that’s the wrong direction, it’s the direction a lot of our competitors still use, I just don’t think it’s the right direction for students because it puts the focus on technology when the focus should be on patients and care,” Kathleen Annala said. “We believe the student learns the healthcare technology innately, through regular interaction with patient information. Learning course content through the EHR, the student becomes an EHR native. That’s why we created EHR Go, to make a system that lends itself to maintaining case information, creating case information and using case information, that’s what was missing.”

Of all the healthcare disciplines, pharmacy has the widest educational scope. Pharmacists have to be experts in core course work like chemistry, but they also have to be experts in what nursing learns and what medicine learns, so they have to branch out, and that’s why EHR Go suits them so well, it helps pharmacy education reach its inherent need to be multifaceted.

Kathleen Annala, CEO and President of Archetype Innovations, LLC, Creators of EHR Go

When Dr. Deepti Vyas, associate professor at the University of the Pacific, started using EHR Go in her therapeutics courses in 2016, it revealed an issue: Her students struggled with order entry (especially when entering orders for intravenous drugs), they had difficulty selecting the correct formulation, diluents and frequency, and they did not always realize how easy it was to make a mistake. Before EHR Go, many students were not getting any practice entering orders until after they graduated.

“From a patient safety perspective, EHR Go has been vital for my students,” Vyas said. “Students understand if they enter medications incorrectly, there’s potential that they could cause patient harm. It’s very real to them, ‘I can make a mistake very easily. I can cause patient harm very easily. I need to think about what I’m doing before I approve an order, I need to collect all the pieces of information I need, because if I don’t, I could harm a patient.’”

Vyas also uses EHR Go in her interprofessional education affiliations, as her pharmacy students share cases with nurse practitioner students from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, working up patients and collaborating on treatments. By working across campuses, across disciplines, students gain such rich experiences that working in interprofessional teams becomes second nature in practice.

“Of all the healthcare disciplines, pharmacy has the widest educational scope,” Kathleen Annala said. “Pharmacists have to be experts in core course work like chemistry, but they also have to be experts in what nursing learns and what medicine learns, so they have to branch out, and that’s why EHR Go suits them so well, it helps pharmacy education reach its inherent need to be multifaceted.”

Faculty can easily edit cases on EHR Go, removing information that does not yet apply or adding nuance to enliven discussion. Faculty can write their own clinical experiences into a case, sharing personal knowledge with students in an applicable way. “I have seen faculty do that in pharmacy, especially,” Kathleen Annala said. “They’re our most prolific creators of content.” And faculty can reach out to the company, share what they would like to see the product do and see those changes made, sometimes that very day.

A true teaching tool, EHR Go is crowd-sourced and community-based. Faculty feel they can take ownership of it. Students feel professional when they use it. To schedule a personalized, online demonstration of EHR Go, or receive more information, visit www.ehrgo.com/pharmacy or call 877-742-3926.