Home > Patient Guide > Clinical Looking Glass

Clinical Looking Glass

What if you had diabetes and treatment wasn’t getting your condition under control? What if you had a problem that was bringing you to the Emergency Room with frequency? In the busy world of medicine, what could help a doctor quickly spot that you need more or different care?

At Montefiore, the answer is a revolutionary new electronic tool called Clinical Looking Glass. This unique software system, developed through the leadership of Dr. Eran Bellin, director of Montefiore’s Outcomes Analysis and Decision Support, is designed to help physicians quickly and easily track patients and provide a quality check on their health.

Montefiore is the only medical center in the New York area to have this capability and one of the first in the nation.

Following Patients for Life

Clinical Looking Glass (CLG) has the power to change the relationship between hospitals and patients. The traditional focus has been acute care—treating a patient’s need at a specific moment. CLG can follow a patient’s health for life. The system offers a clinical safety net to ensure no patient, especially those with chronic conditions, is left behind.

CLG works with other health information systems that Montefiore has implemented. The center is 100-percent computerized for ordering prescription drugs and tests and for reporting the results. Data about patients’ medications and tests is already digitized, providing an electronic medical record for each patient. Using CLG, a physician can pull out and compare test results and other kinds of essential information from those records.

Clinical Looking Glass is Montefiore’s revolutionary electronic tool designed to track the health of thousands of individual patients.

With diabetic patients, for example, a doctor can check tests for hemoglobin levels and identify those patients whose blood sugar level is not declining with treatment. In an emergency setting, patient visits for a specific time period can be tracked. Because the software is designed to identify patients by name, repeat visits by a particular patient are easy to spot. Restrictions on use built into the system protect patient confidentiality.

Facilitating Better Care

CLG is not designed to prescribe treatments. Rather, it facilities better care. Currently in the implementation stage, CLG is being used to monitor diabetic patients and to track patients with congestive heart failure, checking for revisits to the hospital. It is following HIV patients for responses to treatment. CLG results are helping to instruct Montefiore residents on the importance of follow-up care and how care deficiencies can occur.

CLG can track 56,000 patients discharged from the hospital and over 850,000 outpatient visits each year. To develop the software, Montefiore assembled an internal think tank of computer, medical and biostatistician experts. That team collaborated with the 250 doctors and programmers who operate our clinical and management information networks.