EHR Software Advances In Psychiatric Care

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

EHR technology is just beginning to step into the world of psychiatric and behavioral health, but digital health startup has taken a leap forward.

QPID, which started off as a surgery risk-assessment company, has partnered with Silver Hill Hospital, a psychiatric hospital that has been working toward better patient insights — something that’s particularly challenging in the behavioral health realm, according to Med City News.

QPID’s platform was spread through Partners HealthCare system after development at Massachusetts General hospital and in the last year, has seen growth from 4,000 to 7,000 active users, involving 3 million clinical encounters.

Silver Hill

Silver Hill is a 129-bed facility that has adopted QPID’s EHR augmentation software to give it simpler access to clinically relevant information. The hospital also expects that the EHR software will help it on the data front, making it easier for them to spot patterns and improve psychiatric treatment — an effort that has been found to decrease hospitalizations.

Additionally, Silver Hill has adopted QPID’s Cohort App, a behavioral health portal that allows for the collection of information of various patient groups. The platform overall mines data to keep track of compliance and quality metrics related to inpatient psychiatric services — this EHR system is tailored specifically to the needs and safety of behavioral health needs.

A Doctor’s Perspective

Psychiatric hospitals have a lot in common with medical hospitals, but they also have many of their own challenges. Dr. Sigurd Ackerman, president and medical director of Silver Hill weighs in: “We still have a big problem that most hospitals of every kind have — much of the information in the EHR is text. It’s not structured information bits. And so even though we can put the text into the EHR, up until now there has been no way to survey that information and retrieve that information. If we want to know how many patients were discharged on anti-psychotic drugs, we can do that in the blink of an eye versus hours and hours.

“Another way in which it’s helpful for us as a hospital, we have our own questions we’d like to address because it helps us with treatment planning. If we want to query three years’ worth of medical records and see if there’s something that needs a clinical solution, we can do that now because we can enter the question we’re asking and extract the data.”