Neonatal bilirubin management as an implementation example of interdisciplinary continuum of care tools.

Management of newborn bilirubin spans the inpatient and outpatient continuum of care. Intermountain Healthcare has developed and implemented a web-based tool for managing bilirubin that follows newborn patients across care settings and providers with a consistent plan of care. The underlying model for the tool is derived from published guidelines. The model divides the time-sensitive data into risk zones and associates each zone with the appropriate order set for follow-up care. The tool integrates Intermountain's Help2 infrastructure for authoring terms, guidelines, and order sets, with alerts, results, and data entry within the context of the care model. Implementation of the bilirubin management tool is shown to improve communication, ease workflow, and improve guideline compliance. Lessons learned from the implementation include recommendations for handling point-of-care laboratory data and managing archival views, which are insightful to health networks managing longitudinal data.