Improving Quality through Health Information Technology: Testing the Feasibility and Assessing the Impact of Using Existing Health Information Technology Infrastructure for Better Care Delivery

Project Final Report (PDF, 193.24 KB)

Project Details -
Completed

 

The use of health information technology (IT) has the potential to improve quality of care by supporting preventive screening and managing the care of patients with complex conditions and chronic disease. This project assessed the use of health IT to improve care delivery and outcomes for patients with HIV and/or who need cervical cancer screening by documenting and facilitating the use of laboratory orders and test results by clinicians in community health centers (CHCs). Within the clinical areas of cancer screening and HIV care, the project examined how health IT tools such as clinical decision support can improve compliance among patients, as well as efficiency and quality of the health care system by reducing duplicate tests, preventing results from getting lost, and increasing adherence to treatment followup guidelines.

The project was based out of two CHCs in Chicago, Illinois, that use GE's Centricity Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The EHR has the capability to provide clinical decision support, evidenced-based protocols, and automated feedback reports documenting organizational and provider-level performance on laboratory indicators. In addition to collecting quantitative data from the EHR data warehouse on the short-term impact on laboratory followup and duplicate tests, semi-structured interviews were conducted. These included interviews with IT, laboratory, clinical, and administrative staff to document the implementation process, perceived benefits, and utilization of the EHR in laboratory ordering and results communication at the point-of-care, and any resulting workflow changes. Some of the overarching findings based on the experience of the two CHCs included the importance of prioritizing use of health IT tools for those clinical areas that have relatively low rates of clinical adherence and recognizing that improvements in guideline compliance are not immediate and can take as long as 2 years.