Published on March 8, 2018

The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) serves different purposes including documentation of care and billing. One part of the EMR at the University of Missouri Hospital and Clinics is the Message Center. Many people, including healthcare providers, nurses, social workers, therapists, office staff, and nurse care managers (known as the interdisciplinary team, or IDT) work together to deliver healthcare.

This research examines how the Message Center is used in primary care by nurse care managers to document care coordination activities, including communication between patients, patient identified family or significant other, and the IDT. Care coordination activities, and the focus of those activities will be extracted and described. Social network analysis will be used to expose and map the communication between different users of message center. This research aims to describe communication practices across healthcare settings.