Using Health Information Technology in Practice Redesign: Impact of Health Information Technology on Workflow
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Project Details -
Completed
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Contract Number290-10-0019I-1
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Funding Mechanism(s)
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AHRQ Funded Amount$799,014
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Principal Investigator(s)
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Organization
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LocationBillingsMontana
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Project Dates06/01/2012 - 07/31/2015
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Care Setting
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Population
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Type of Care
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Health Care Theme
Health information technology (IT) has the potential to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of care. However, the implementation of new health IT systems can change established clinical work processes and workflow, creating more work and unfavorable workflow changes for end users. Anticipated benefits of health IT are therefore difficult to achieve unless implementation and workflow challenges are identified and addressed. This project was one of three contracts awarded under the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ACTION II request for task order (RFTO) titled Using Health IT in Practice Redesign: Impact of Health IT on Workflow. The goal of this RFTO was to fund methodologically rigorous research studies of health IT implementation to support practice redesign in ambulatory care settings and to enhance understanding of the causal relationships between health IT and workflow processes.
The overall objective of this project was to study the impacts of health IT implementation on workflow processes in six primary and specialty ambulatory care practices from two participating health care organizations: Billings Clinic in Montana and Cabin Creek Health Systems in West Virginia. These organizations serve different patient populations living in areas with distinct geographic and socioeconomic profiles. Both organizations are engaged in major practice redesign efforts with various health IT implementations to create patient-centered medical homes. Specifically, Billings Clinic planned to implement: 1) an electronic patient homepage in their existing electronic health record (EHR) that aggregates patient information; 2) a standardized message center application; and 3) an e-prescribing application. Cabin Creek Health Systems planned to implement a completely new EHR. New features were to include automatic telephone patient reminders and followup for no-shows, a patient portal, patient kiosks at the clinic, computerized order system with tracking, integrated education materials, deficiency/gaps in care reporting, extensive library of template notes, and voice-recognition for progress note completion.
A mixed-methods approach was applied to understand the relationship between these various health IT implementations and ambulatory care workflow redesign, socio-technical factors and the role they play in mitigating or augmenting health IT’s impacts on workflow processes, and the workflow impacts of health IT magnified through frequently occurring disruptive events such as interruptions and exceptions. The components of the planned evaluation included: 1) non-participant observations and contextual inquiries; 2) mapping and remapping of study practices 3) a pre-post time and motion study; 4) an exploratory log analysis of audit trails and time-stamped clinical data; 5) post-implementation semi-structured interviews; and 6) results triangulation and member checking. Using these complementary quantitative and qualitative methods, this project generated data and insight for understanding how health IT implementation alters clinical workflow and the root causes and consequences of such impacts.
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