Electronic Health Records Can Improve the Organ Donation Process

or years, we’ve mostly heard about how electronic health records systems have made clinicians’ lives a nightmare. But recently, innovators have found ways to tap their potential to save time and costs and improve quality. One example is a tool that New England Donor Services developed to streamline the time it takes to screen whether a patient who is near death or has just died is a potential organ donor.

In the last decade, the dark side of electronic health records (EHR) systems has received the most attention: how their complexity and time-consuming demands have added to physicians’ and nurses’ workloads, contributing to burnout. But in recent years, we have begun to see more and more provider organizations harness the EHR’s potential to improve care and reduce its time and costs. An initiative conducted by New England Donor Services (NEDS) and Yale New Haven Health to streamline the process for identifying potential organ donors for patients needing transplants is one of the latest examples. It offers practical insights for other organizations that are seeking to tap the power of EHRs to perform other functions and, if they are having to contend with multiple EHRs that aren’t completely compatible, how to address that challenge.