PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
The electronic health record (EHR) is a powerful tool that has the potential to facilitate communication across
healthcare systems. The EHR has the capability to support the needs of clinicians, patients, caregivers,
administrators, researchers, payers, and other stakeholders by informing clinical practice, facilitating
administrative operations (e.g., quality improvement initiatives), and supporting research. Pulmonary function
testing (PFT) is a key part of the diagnostic assessment in pulmonary medicine and is critical to assessing the
pulmonary status of patients over time. Currently, PFT values are typically available in a server that stores PFT
data, but this is not interfaced directly to the EHR. The efforts to interface PFTs to the EHR to date have been
siloed efforts that have not benefited from a unified approach of the pulmonary community. The ultimate goal is
to have core set of PFT results reported as discrete data elements in all electronic health records for use in
clinical care and research. To achieve this goal, a workshop is proposed to address the utility of successful
EHR PFT interoperability for research and clinical goals and review logistical challenges and prior successes in
EHR PFT integration, with the focus on developing a roadmap to PFT integration into the EHR. The speaker
and participant list includes key stakeholders from adult and pediatric general and pulmonary medicine,
researchers, PFT laboratories, Veterans Health Administration and health maintenance organizations,
informaticists, patient-advocacy groups, and multiple EHR and PFT companies. The deliverables of the
workshop have potential to advance the field and to improve quality of patient care and research in large
institutions and to create a path forward to smaller healthcare systems and practices that may not have the
resources otherwise required to ensure interoperabilty of PFTs.