Clinical Informatics for Beginners: Understanding How Informatics Can Improve Your Practice Starting Tomorrow (FR413)

Abstract

•Define clinical informatics and explain key concepts and language needed by hospice and palliative care professionals to more effectively advocate for Supportive Care EMR needs.•List opportunities to obtain deeper expertise, including clinical information.•Explain multi-disciplinary applications of informatics in Supportive Care.•Explain how informatics can be leveraged to improve care models and quality of care delivery. Why should palliative care and hospice professionals care about clinical informatics? Because harnessing informatics for supportive care nursing, social work, spiritual care, and clinicians is able to improve nearly every element of healthcare delivery for our patients, families, and providers. Through the analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of information and information systems, clinical informatics enhances individual and population health outcomes, improves patient care, and strengthens the clinician-patient relationship. Hence it is vitally important that palliative care and hospice professionals and administrators understand how to unlock the potential of informatics in research and clinical delivery. In this practical and interactive session, we will cover core concepts, strategies, and language that everyone in supportive care should understand about informatics, provide insight into how informatics will shape the future of our field, and share how clinicians may deepen their expertise or even attain board certification. We will explain the importance of data collection and visualization by programs in order to advocate for multi-disciplinary programmatic growth and affect change in the quality of care delivery. We will explain the ongoing efforts to merge three major palliative care databases, PCQN, QDACT, and CAPC, and detail how informatics can be leveraged for mobile health applications and data-driven, trigger-based clinical decision support. We will conclude our presentation by discussing how informatics might shape the future of palliative care through novel clinical care delivery models, using clinical trials of mobile digital health applications and telehealth in palliative care as examples. Our hope is for the presentation to serve as a catalyst to facilitate palliative care and hospice professionals attaining the informatics skills necessary to effectively advocate for and partner with local IT governance to enhance patient-centric, multi-disciplinary care delivery and in doing so, help meet the rising needs of our field in the years to come.