UChicago Medicine has launched an application within the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system, which may soon be adopted across other Epic EHRs.
The AutoDx feature automates the inclusion of patients’ conditions and risk factors into the EHR’s note template, helping clinicians avoid missing important details and reducing coding queries. The goal is to enhance care quality and reduce clinician burnout, making the documentation process more efficient and less time-consuming for healthcare providers.
Initially starting with three diagnoses, AutoDx has now expanded to include 15. This tool has been widely adopted by clinicians across the health system, including in pediatric and community hospitals as well as the hospital-at-home program. Its growing utilization underscores its value in various healthcare settings, from traditional hospital environments to innovative home-based care.
AutoDx automatically populates patient-specific diagnoses in notes, allowing providers to delete entries if they disagree. The tool has proven to be highly accurate, generating appropriate diagnoses based on well-crafted logic. These automatically populated risk factors are crucial for coding and billing, external rankings, quality reporting, and other important statistics that institutions rely on.
For example, if a patient has obesity, the diagnosis will appear in the note along with the patient’s BMI and the severity of the condition. This ensures that critical health information is consistently recorded, supporting better patient outcomes and more precise healthcare management.
After presenting AutoDx at the Epic Users Group Meeting, several health systems expressed interest in implementing the feature. This growing interest indicates the potential for widespread adoption, enabling more healthcare providers to benefit from this innovative tool. The opportunity for other institutions to integrate AutoDx into their EHR systems will soon be available, potentially transforming documentation practices across the healthcare industry.
To read more about the features of this tool, please click here.
