Enterprise Apps on a Consumer Grade Budget: a patient-friendly tablet-based secure consent form integrated with electronic medical records, powered by Qualtrics, Apple, KioskPro and the Epic API.

Eric Meeks / Oksana Gologorskaya
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Proctor

The UCSF Precision Medicine effort and the research enterprise need to obtain consent from patients in order to use remnant blood and biological specimens for research. Patients are often happy to consent, but the process is often bogged down by reliance on old-fashioned pen and paper forms that are difficult to scale up.

In 2017, using intelligence garnered from a successful implementation at UCLA, UCSF's CTSI research technology team implemented a brand new process for UCSF: an iPad-delivered patient education video and electronic consent form for patients waiting in clinics for a blood draw. Developing the process was challenging because of three key requirements: electronic data capture, embedding educational video within the workflow, and secure real time identity verification using UCSF's electronic medical record.

UCSF is quite different from UCLA and we found that while we could learn from the UCLA implementation, we could not simply duplicate their model. While both institutions chose iPads as the data collection device, UCSF did not have a biospecimen technology partner/vendor like UCLA. We did know however, that the HIPAA compliant Qualtrics research platform allowed for building elegant user-friendly surveys and could be configured to embed video within the survey workflow. Qualtrics surveys can work on tablets, but we needed a strictly controlled workflow limited to just one task — completing the consent form. For this, we needed a kiosk app that would turn an iPad into a kiosk, and we found the KioskPro software. We made our Qualtrics survey talk to our electronic medical record (EMR) via the Epic Interconnect API, by solving a tricky technical puzzle (and pioneering a technique that can be reused by other Qualtrics surveys). (Epic is the most widely used EMR system in the US and is implemented at the 5 UC campuses that do research in health sciences: UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco.)

The final solution is technically and visually elegant, has received positive feedback from patients, and has already enabled the collection of dozens of patient research consents. The system was built in about 3 months and involved only part-time effort from two of our team members. An alternative custom app for implementing the same workflow would cost UCSF at least $50,000.

In this session, we will walk you through the key steps and nuances of setting up a tablet-based kiosk that features a video, enables secure data capture from patients, and integrates with the UCSF clinical systems.

Previous Knowledge

No prior knowledge required. (Familiarity with web, mobile apps, and/or online survey tools may be helpful).

Software Installation Expectation

None