Electronic health records vendor drchrono has debuted a new enterprise unified task management application that now is available within the company’s EHR.

The unified task management application is designed to improve workflow for physicians and staff, enabling them to create tasks, including recurring tasks, from wherever they are in the platform. Physicians and staff then can assign tasks to teams or groups of individuals, such as the front desk team, and have information automatically populate directly in the specific task.

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Caregivers can attach lab results, clinical notes, medications and refill requests to a task. Launching a task within the EHR enables the task creator to pull in information with context from the relevant screen they are on. For example, if a doctor is working on a specific patient’s chart and they need to create a task for a medical assistant, the physician can import all of the relevant information with a few clicks or taps, not having to retype any information.

Further, drchrono’s new task dashboard gives the practice a view of all open and closed tasks, showing statuses and priorities and the time it takes to complete a task. The task dashboard, for instance, can show where a specific task is taking too much time and needs to be optimized.

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Also, care teams can see when a specific group of tasks are urgent; tasks bubble up to the top of the dashboard for a team to see what needs to be completed first.

“The new task management provides a much more sophisticated workflow for larger practices that are reviewing large amounts of patient data, taking copious notes, and filling medication and lab requests daily, and want to do it all in a more efficient manner,” said Daniel Kivatinos, co-founder and COO at drchrono. “Our end goal for this is that a practice using task management would be able to do complex workflows.”

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For example, Kivatinos said, a patient walks into a practice, the doctor sees the patient, the physician triggers a lab test for a blood draw, which triggers a staff member to draw blood, then sends the request to the lab.

Once the patient’s lab results are back in drchrono, he added, the task triggers the next step, for the physician to review the labs, then alert the staff to call the patient to come back in to review the labs with the physician in person.

“This would greatly improve efficiencies and information flow for both the practice and the patient,” he said.

The unified task management application also includes: real-time reminders and notifications for staff, for example, push notifications from iOS; triggering tasks from the provider filling out a medical form, for example, a physician can trigger a task that can be created automatically to schedule a follow-up visit; adding subtasks within tasks to create more complex workflows.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com