BookZurman Congratulates Dr. Kaeli Yuen for being named a 2021 FedHealthIT Innovation Award Winner!

The 7th Annual FedHealthIT Innovation Awards recognize and honor the federal health technology and consulting community. The awards celebrate programs nominated and selected by peers for driving innovation and results across the Department of Veterans Affairs, Military Health, Health and Human Services, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

BookZurman nominated Dr. Yuen, Presidential Innovation Fellow, for her groundbreaking work on the COVID Patient Manager (CPM) & VA SMART on FHIR Container project.

COVID-19 is a novel disease that presents myriad challenges to clinicians caring for affected patients. Clinicians must keep up with new clinical guidelines and take on an increasing number of telehealth appointments. Helpful tools (e.g., clinical decision support applications that provide recommendations at the point of care) are beneficial; however, they are not well integrated into the electronic health record, which is the centerpiece of clinician workflow. In this project, the goal is to provide decision support to clinicians working with COVID-19 in a way that is tightly integrated into the current clinical workflow – and ultimately leads to better outcomes for patients.

This project’s innovation is highlighted in how its Veteran-centered Patient Manager application embraces a design using best available interoperability standards from HL7 to enable use with both CPRS/VistA and Cerner systems within VA. Another innovative aspect is the active engagement between the development team and VA physicians from three VA medical center Emergency Departments who will be users of the new application.

The VA COVID Patient Manager application and SMART on FHIR app launch with CPRS/VistA integration was developed in four months from project inception. This project showed rapid progress from initial formation of the development team in December 2020 to pilot-ready Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in early April 2021. Dr. Yuen is the project manager and coordinated all clinical and technical roles of the project team to quickly engage VA support as needed to resolve roadblocks or delays.

At the time of this submission, live clinical pilot testing is ready to begin in three VA medical centers, pending final work to complete VistA data integration and testing. VA clinical subject experts from three medical centers were actively engaged throughout the development lifecycle. The application UI/UX has received praise from the candidate VA clinical users and interest has been expressed by multiple VA clinical and business champions to leverage the innovative foundations created by this team.

The CPM project was nominated and selected by a panel comprised of current and former federal health leaders across government and industry, and will be recognized virtually during the upcoming 7^th Annual FedHealthIT Innovation Awards event June 22 - 23, 2021, in addition to recognition at the FedHealthIT Innovation Awards, to be held virtually June 8-9, 2021. They will also be featured on FedHealthIT.com and in the annual issue of the FedHealthIT print and digital magazine.

Congratulations again on this award and brilliant work!

BookZurman’s team of multidisciplinary, highly specialized experts continue to drive progress and innovation in the healthcare IT community. For more information on this and other work in the areas of standards and interoperability, informatics architecture or clinical decision support, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.