O2080: Babies Aren’t Born with Cell Phones, Yet--Initiative to Improve the Accuracy of Pediatric Patient & Family Contact Information

Background: Patient-centered pediatric care requires effective family engagement, smooth transitions to autonomous adult care, and protection of adolescent confidentiality. A key barrier is difficulty distinguishing patient and guardian contact information in the electronic health record (EHR), leading to low staff confidence in communicating with the right person and frequent errors in adolescent portal signups risking confidentiality breaches. Our study objective was to create, implement and evaluate an initiative of EHR modifications and registration process improvements to optimize collection of patient and parent/guardian contact information.

Methods: A multidisciplinary committee at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health (SMCH) launched an initiative in 2023 to improve documentation of EHR patient/guardian contact information. SMCH uses Epic EHR (Epic Systems, Verona, WI) and MyChart® patient portal. New fields were created in June 2024 to ensure appropriate contact information entry. For children ( < 12), currently the patient fields are populated with the parent/guardian’s contact information since the child would not have an independent mobile phone number/email address. After interventions, phone number and email addresses will not be entered in the patient fields and will be blocked from entry. Instead, all contact information will be collected and stored within contact records only. For Adolescents (12-17) and Adults 18+, a patient’s phone number or email address may be collected if they have their own at that time independent of the parent/guardian and patient contact records continue to be available. Preferred contact and interpreter needs are emphasized for all contacts. We surveyed SMCH staff on confidence in identifying appropriate contact information, pre and post-intervention. We monitored percentage of patients with contact information documented in inappropriate fields in the EHR by age group.

Results: Among SMCH staff, 46% strongly disagreed or disagreed with their ability to find an adolescent's contact information to share confidential information. Since EHR changes, inappropriate mobile numbers (Figure 1) decreased by 29% (66% to 37%) and inappropriate email addresses (Figure 2) by 10% (24% to 14%) for children (n=182577). Inappropriate mobile numbers decreased by 25% (61% to 36%) and inappropriate email addresses decreased by 5% (13% to 8%) for adolescents (n=94109). Preliminary data show a 25% decrease in EHR portal activation errors for adolescent accounts.

Conclusion: Aligning the necessary contact fields in the EHR has improved accuracy of patient/guardian contact information and decreased EHR portal activation errors for adolescent accounts. Future directions include continued monitoring of metrics and evaluating impact on quality of care.