Field Notes: My Life, My Story EHR Integration

The My Life, My Story (MLMS) program is a narrative medicine initiative originally developed at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2013.

Therefore, the final step in the process is the most crucial: The incorporation of these stories into patients’ medical charts offers all providers the chance to learn about the parts of their patients’ lives that are most meaningful to them. Incorporation of a life narrative into a patient’s electronic health record (EHR) poses a unique challenge. single provider who was involved in health information and EHR functionality to explain the MLMS program, discuss options, and collaboratively formulate a plan. That provider then served as our liaison to the medical systems’ health information teams that built our MLMS EHR integration. With signed consents from a handful of patients who had participated, we shared example narratives with the liaison, explained in detail the process for consenting a patient for the project and maintaining their privacy, and discussed options for incorporation into Epic. In fact, a pilot study showed that providers wanted patient life narratives in an area of the EHR that was more prominent than a progress note.1 We considered adding this narrative into the social history section of Epic, but we worried that providers would pull the entire 1,000-word narrative into their notes with social history templates. At one of those two sites, also a multihospital system, the process from initial meetings to going live with the “My Life, My Story” FYI tab took about four weeks, and the EHR liaison was an internal medicine physician. While patients clearly