Epic ehr system

Patients were identified in a prostate cancer clinical data warehouse, which is described in detail elsewhere. [21 ] In brief, data were collected from a tertiary-care academic medical center using the Epic EHR system (Epic Systems, Verona, WI) and managed in an EHR-based relational database. Patients were linked to an internal cancer registry and the California Cancer Registry (CCR) to gather additional information on treatments outside the institute, recurrence and survival. This study received the approval from the institute’s Institutional Review Board (IRB).

The study took place from April 1, 2013 through March 1, 2014 in adult primary care practices of the Mount Sinai Healthcare System. These were academically affiliated medical practices which included a hospital-based clinic and a hospital-based faculty practice, both located in the Upper East Side and East Harlem communities of New York City, and community-based faculty practices in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. The hospital clinic has 4 independently operating practices, employs 20 faculty physicians and is the outpatient training venue for 140 medical residents. It has approximately 55,000 visits each year. The hospital-based faculty practice consists of 12 full-time physicians who provide care during 35,000 patient visits annually. Mount Sinai’s North Shore (Nassau County) community-based faculty practice group consists of 4 practices with 12 primary care physicians and 3 nurse practitioners. They have approximately 62,000 visits annually. All practices used the Epic EHR system at the time of the study (Epic Systems, Madison, WI).
A research assistant approached all physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, and medical assistants at all sites, in person or by email, described the study and requested their consent to receive the EHR-based alerts. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.