Andrea Price, APN, Discusses Electronic Medical Records in CAR T-Cell Therapy

Andrea Price, APN, associate director for clinical research at the Washington University School of Medicine, spoke about the value and challenges of electronic medical records (EMRs) in CAR T-cell therapy at the 2020 Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings, held February 19-23, 2020 in Orlando, Florida.

Transcription:

Well, the EMR is really what we use to drive our ordering process for CAR Ts, but more importantly, it’s really allowed us to dive into what are the nursing considerations for how you can document about your patients receiving CAR T therapy, how we can capture really useful assessments to help drive their care for side effects for toxicities, especially if the patient starts to decline, we’re really trying to capture that in a meaningful way to help nurses and physicians make the right decision every step along the way. 

The challenge is that CAR T therapy doesn’t seem really new to providers and anybody at this meeting, but CAR T therapy to the medical record seems new. It wasn’t really built for this type of therapy, which requires a lot of collaboration with your EMR team to make it fit the workflows, to make it fit the special patient population. So, the challenge is that it doesn’t come out of the box with the tools that you need, you really have to design them from the ground up.