A young woman is admitted to hospital suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. She is quickly operated on but following surgery hospital staff are puzzled when the woman’s blood pressure remains very high. They keep her in the intensive care unit while they work to determine the cause of this dangerous situation. This patient’s family physician is Dr. Joseph Ojedokun.
Based in Whitecourt, Dr. Ojedokun has a community practice, and went live on
Community Information Integration/Central Patient Attachment Registry (CII/CPAR) in the spring of 2020. One of the features of that initiative is the uploading of encounter information from the physician’s conformed EMR to CII contributing to the Community Encounter Digest (CED) report in Alberta Netcare.
The CED report summarizes the care a patient received over the past 12 months from all community-based clinics in Alberta that participate in the CII/CPAR program. The
CED report includes patient visit information including clinical assessment and observations.
Returning to the situation in the hospital and at a loss to resolve the patient’s issue, the attending physician logs into Netcare and is able to see through the CED that Dr. Ojedokun had provided care to the patient over the past year. Quickly, the attending physician contacts Dr. Ojedokun, knowing that as the primary care provider he would likely have key health information about the patient.
Success! Dr. Ojedokun is able to tell the attending physician that the patient is an active user of Crystal Meth. Methamphetamines can cause blood vessels to constrict and spasm causing dangerous spikes in blood pressure with eventual cardiovascular damage. This additional information about the patient allows the acute care team to provide her with an appropriate treatment plan and subsequent transition back to primary care in her community.
This is just one of many amazing patient impact stories,
physicians live on CII/CPAR have experienced. It is an information exchange that is made possible through CII/CPAR and Netcare. Dr. Ojedokun says participation promotes patient safety, timely, efficient, and effective patient-centered care.
