Leadership Message: Solving problems through clinical informatics

Dear Colleagues,

As your new Chief Health Information Officer (CHIO), I’d like to reintroduce ‘Clinical Informatics” to the UC Davis Health community. 

Clinical informatics is several things – a medical board certification, an area of nursing and pharmacy focus, an area of academic study, and a department here that’s part of System Clinical Care Services. But it is not part of Information Technology. Rather, we work closely with IT to make changes to our systems, but we focus on people and workflows, while making sure the technology is designed correctly to achieve UC Davis Health’s strategic goals. 

One definition is: We use data, design, and information technology to improve health and healthcare. 

Clinical informaticists work at the intersection of IT, clinical care, and operations to solve problems. 

Our department contains the PEP Squad (Practice Experience Program) that works with providers to train them to use Epic as efficiently as possible, and builds tools in Epic to improve the experience for all. It also houses the Physician Builder program where a number of physicians are certified by Epic to create things like documentation tools, alerts, order panels to address UC Davis Health’s needs.

In addition, our people work closely with IT and users and leaders across the enterprise to understand struggles and design solutions – these may not be Epic changes, but could be modifications to workflows or teaching of how to use existing technologies.

Some area clinical informatics is working on now include:

• Standardized clinical pathways with AgileMD – with an end goal of improving quality and measured outcomes.
• AI applications such as AI scribe, chart summarization tools, and advanced chart search tools.
• Compliance with and influence over evolving regulations such as reproductive health data privacy.
• Improved communication to Epic users for changes and upgrades.
• Designing new, and refining existing decision support (such as pop-up alerts). 
• Improving documentation templates to reduce note bloat, support charge capture and decrease denials, and capture our patients’ complexity for risk adjustment and quality reporting. 
• Supporting training of the next generation of informaticists through the Fellowship and PEP externship for graduate students.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to engage with clinical informatics – either to help you solve problems or participate on the team.

My vision is to grow informatics formally and informally across UC Davis Health over the next several years. Bringing these principles to how work is done across all areas of the health system could lead to us all doing our jobs better and more easily- thus freeing up time to be the best clinicians we can be. 

Thank you for your teamwork and support.

Yours in health,

Scott MacDonald, M.D.
Chief Health Information Officer
UC Davis Health