Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - PostDoc Western Canada 2-year

The aim of this project is to decrease clinician documentation burden by automating a mandated, standardized assessment tool (interRAI HC) used to evaluate patient functioning, quality of life parameters, and support the implementation of person-centered care planning and healthcare services in community settings. Currently, this assessment tool is not designed to reuse existing clinical charting. This means that clinicians are often required to duplicate their assessment findings in multiple forms. Documentation burden, such as duplication, is a known issue in healthcare and contributes to time loss in direct patient care and clinician burnout. This project will evaluate the standardized assessment tool and extract relevant clinical concepts and map these to existing sources of electronic documentation which can be targeted for reuse. The assessment tool will then be transformed into a prototype web-form with automation and natural language processing techniques to facilitate data reuse and support tool completion. The data sources will leverage existing health authority nursing community electronic health records. The prototype will be evaluated by clinicians and subject matter experts for feasibility and clinical usefulness. The overall project development and findings will be co-created and shared with the health authority. This project provides a novel opportunity to apply emerging technology processes with existing clinical documentation to automate the completion of a standardized assessment tool.