More Precise Emergency Care over the Phone with EpicCare Link

When patients in the Capital Region of Denmark call the acute triage line 1813, they can now give permission for the responding clinician to view their web-based medical record in EpicCare Link. Since the Denmark Capital Region went live with EpicCare Link in July 2018, clinicians have used it to understand more about patients’ history, providing important context to improve care.

For example, an elderly man called 1813 but couldn’t articulate his symptoms. The clinician on the line reviewed his medical record in EpicCare Link and learned he had a history of blood clots in his brain, which can cause confusion. The clinician immediately sent an ambulance, and the patient received effective treatment for his blood clot right away. If the clinician hadn’t had access to the chart in EpicCare Link, she might not have been able to identify a blood clot as the issue.

Giving emergency response clinicians access to EpicCare Link means patients don’t have to provide all of their own medical history details over the phone, allowing clinicians to act more quickly, with a fuller view of the patient’s situation. This access also gives patients more confidence in the emergency response system.

“With the read-only access to [Epic], we can honor a little more of the citizens’ expectations of our knowledge,” said Marie Baastrup, the unit manager of the Capital Region’s emergency response office. “It increases the citizen’s confidence in our professionalism.”

Read the press release in Danish on the Region Hovedstaden news site.