athenahealth adds tools to enable monitoring of COVID-19
In response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, athenahealth has added new guidance, diagnostic testing orders and screening questions to its network-based electronic health record (EHR).
The specific resources made available to athenahealth ambulatory and hospital customers include:
· New travel-related screening questions available directly within EHR workflows;
· New diagnostic test order sets containing CDC-recommended testing and specimen collection procedures;
· Detailed recommendations about how to leverage screening questions and diagnostic tests, as well as direct links to the latest CDC guidance.
Additionally, athenahealth is monitoring its network to measure how often customers use these resources. During the first week of availability, the screening questions have been used in nearly 30,000 patient encounters.
The functionality added to athenahealth’s software follow similar updates to electronic medical record (EMR) products from Epic and InterSystems. Epic updated its standard travel screening tool with questions specific to COVID-19, while Intersystems added a screening tool and a link to the coronavirus Global tracking app provided by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.