Innovation in healthcare encompasses a vast range of initiatives led by teams dedicated to improving patients’ experiences and outcomes. These advances all start with identification of a problem, often through clinical experience and careful analysis of the vast amount of data being collected in the healthcare system. In my year as a DIHI scholar, I worked on projects to address many problems including: cancer patients’ symptoms often go unaddressed; unnecessary labs can be costly to patients; early readmission to the hospital is harmful to patients. Each of these projects started with data and then we built solutions that married technology and clinical care to help our patients.

In my primary projects, I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Thomas LeBlanc to integrate patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into the electronic health record (EHR) in cancer clinics across Duke. This project stemmed from data that illustrated how many patients’ symptoms go unaddressed in increasingly short clinical visits. This can lead to many unintended consequences such as emergency department visits and shorter life expectancy for cancer patients. Using the capabilities of the existing EHR, we piloted a project utilizing PROs to systematically captured patients’ symptoms ahead of the clinical visit to better enable clinicians see trends (figure 1) and address all of their patients’ chief concerns. Success of this project hinged on optimizing the clinical workflow and learning how to best engage patients through technology, which are key components of many efficacious innovations in our field.

To shape the future of patient care, clinicians in our evolving environment need to be increasingly confident in working with data and technology. This year has given me hands- on experience dealing with the complexities and potential of harnessing healthcare data to promote change. These skills can be translated into every specialty, but I’ll specifically be applying them to a career in obstetrics and gynecology.