Franklin Gaylis, MD, presented “Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Risk Stratification for Prostate Cancer” for the Grand Rounds in Urology audience in June 2021.

How to cite: Gaylis, Franklin. “Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Risk Stratification for Prostate Cancer” June 2021. Accessed Mar 2024. https://grandroundsinurology.com/leveraging-the-emr-to-improve-quality-in-risk-stratification-for-prostate-cancer/

Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Risk Stratification for Prostate Cancer – Summary:

In part 1 of a 3-part series, Franklin Gaylis, MD, FACS, Chief Scientific Officer of Genesis Healthcare Partners and Voluntary Professor of Urology at the University of California, San Diego, looks at how improved quality reporting can improve risk stratification for prostate cancer. Dr. Gaylis explains that the United States’ healthcare system has begun a transition from volume to value due to legislation like the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, and this shift to value will require data for reporting adherence to quality measures. However, while much is to be gained from quality measurement, the current system of quality reporting is extremely expensive and time-consuming, and greater effort is needed to standardize measures and make them easier to report. Dr. Gaylis then looks at a study by Genesis Healthcare intended to improve documentation and staging templates for digital rectal examinations (DREs) for prostate cancer staging and risk stratification. They found that DRE documentation is generally quite variable and not very specific, and that by leveraging the electronic medical record (EMR) with explicit templates, they were able to increase physician confidence in DRE findings. More accurate DRE documentation leads to improved risk stratification and therefore improved care of patients with prostate cancer. Dr. Gaylis concludes that by encouraging urology practices to record more accurate and precise DRE information, better templates for reporting can improve patient care.

Parts 2 and 3 of Dr. Gaylis’ look at how the EMR template can improve outcomes in urology will be published on GRU in the coming weeks.

Disclosure: Dr. Gaylis has an ownership stake in GenIT LLC, which owns WizMD, a software program created at Genesis Healthcare Partners that is used for data extraction. It currently has no significant value.