Pegwin, a Houston, Texas Patient Safety Innovation Company is a Winner of the HHS ONC Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced the three winners of a new challenge to develop software for identifying and reporting safety and usability issues in electronic health records (EHR) to support healthcare providers in delivering exceptional care to patients.

Patients still experience needless harm and often struggle to have their voices heard, processes are not as efficient as they could be and costs continue to rise at alarming rates while quality issues remain. Pegwin’s winning tools make it easy to report patient care issues giving feedback to developers and guiding the formation of safe and reliable practices. Busy clinicians managing a full patient load, perform diagnostic work and enter data, don’t have time to document and report safety and usability issues to their quality and IT departments.

"Helping reduce the burden of health IT continues to be a key area of focus at the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, and we anticipate the winning submissions to the Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge will help with those efforts," said ONC chief Dr. Don Rucker.

Pegwin, a multidisciplinary collaboration between leading academic institutions and a multinational technological partnership with an Israeli startup, Efficacy Care, has developed an intuitive reporting system that allows a user to capture patient safety issues “in as few as three clicks” without leaving the EHR. This innovation enables the clinician to identify patient safety and quality of care issues caused by the electronic medical record itself or associated with a medication, a test, or a device, and submit the issue for analysis and process improvement in real-time.

This tool will help clinicians report EHR usability, quality and safety issues faster, and reduce nurses and physicians’ workload. It will reduce the cost of care by connecting patient data, preventing patient deterioration, and streamlining the accurate collection and sharing of that data starting from a patient’s bedside, extending to payers and providers. Pegwin leads the way addressing the importance of use and adoption of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve patient health and quality of care.

"Improving the safety of health IT remains an important priority," said Dr. Andy Gettinger, ONC chief clinical officer. "We believe that making it easier for end users to report will help in that goal."

The Pegwin platform is a certified Patient Safety Evaluation System (PSES) that conforms with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Common Formats. This system separates Patient Safety Work Product (PSWP) from Non-PSWP and submits it to the AHRQ Privacy Protection Center (PPC) and/or the hospital’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO). Pegwin's solutions are easily adopted in combination with national pledges in achieving ZERO preventable deaths by engaging all hospitals and clinicians.

The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business, Health Informatics and Health Information Technology Program, and the San Antonio University Health System (UHS) worked closely with the Pegwin team as design and evaluation collaborators to validate the usability and implementation of the Pegwin “3-Click Solution”. Additional information about the Easy EHR Issue

Reporting Challenge is available at https://www.cccinnovationcenter.com/challenges/easy-ehr-issue-reporting-challenge/.