Building Back Better: Applying Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic to Expand Critical Information Access.

Background: The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic generated an unprecedented volume of evolving clinical guidelines that strained existing clinical information systems and necessitated rapid innovation in emergency departments (EDs).

Objectives: Our team aimed to harness new COVID-19-related reliance on digital clinical support tools to re-envision how all clinical guidelines are stored and accessed in our ED.

Methods: We used a design-thinking approach including empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing to develop a low-cost, homegrown clinical information hub: E*Drive.