Impact of Health IT on Quality Assessment:
Innovations in Measurement and Reporting
Excerpted from AHRQ on June 20, 2010
This free 90-minute teleconference will explore the use of quality measures to improve patient care.
Date: June 23
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 p.m., ET
Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health IT
• Denni McColm, M.B.A., is Chief Information Officer for Citizens Memorial Healthcare. She has been at Citizens Memorial since 1988, serving as Director of Human Resources and Director of Finance before moving into the CIO role in June, 2003. Ms. McColm served on the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology as a Commissioner from 2006-2008. She also served on the Davies Awards of Excellence Organizational Selection Committee from 2006 -2008 and again in 2010. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Healthcare IT News, published in partnership with HIMSS. Ms. McColm holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
• Karen Kmetik, Ph.D., is Vice President of Performance Improvement at the American Medical Association (AMA), where she provides strategic leadership for AMA initiatives in health care quality measurement and improvement. She also leads the activities of the AMA-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement® (PCPI) through continued development and effectiveness testing of performance measures, advancement of the integration of the measures into health IT, and implementation in a variety of programs. Dr. Kmetik is a founding member of the Collaborative for Performance Measure Integration with EHR Systems, co-sponsored by the AMA, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA).
• Henry Fischer, M.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and a practicing internist at Denver Health Medical Center (DH). He is director of the diabetes collaborative at Denver Health, which serves over 7000 primarily indigent adult patients with diabetes. He was the PI on an AHRQ funded study of, i) the automated distribution of individualized diabetic performance report cards to patients by mail and at the point of care, and, ii) the electronic distribution of provider performance report cards on diabetes measures with patient-level data. He is currently studying the use of text messaging to help manage diabetes outside of clinic visits in a primarily low-income population.
Ms. McColm will begin the teleconference by providing an overview of the three year quality measurement project at Citizens Memorial Healthcare. She will discuss the challenges involved with applying quality measurement in ambulatory care and describe how they were able to achieve their goals. Dr. Kmetik will describe the Cardio-HIT project, whereby different practice sites with different EHRs exported data to a warehouse for the calculation of national performance measures. She also will describe current efforts to design measure specifications to enable integration of measures into EHRs. Dr. Fischer will conclude the event by presenting on the use of an integrated diabetes registry to improve the quality of care for adult diabetic patients in a safety net system. He will describe the effects of providing both patients and providers information via report cards and the benefits and challenges of this process.
