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July 8-10, 2009 - New York City
EHR Implementation | Advanced Uses of HIT
Thank you for joining us at the Health Information Technology Workshop held July 8-10th in New York City. We appreciate the opportunity to share our experiences with you. We are also grateful to our guest speakers for lending their expertise.
Workshop materials, including slide presentations, can be accessed here.
April, 2009 - Neil Calman MD, president and CEO of the Institute for Family Health, will represent the interests of vulnerable populations on a new Health Information Technology Policy Panel. Dr. Calman is one of 13 members appointed by the Obama Administration to make policy recommendations on the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure, a critical component of a health reform plan. See press release.
HIT Overview
In 2002, the Institute became the first community health center network in New York State to implement Epic, an electronic
health record and practice management system,
leading the way to extensive collaboration with the
New York City Department of Health and Mental
Hygiene's Primary Care Information Project,
Syndromic Surveillance System, and Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics. These projects improve and protect the health of New Yorkers. See more below.
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MyChart-MyHealth is our private Web program for patients to view some of their health information, e-mail their provider, make an appointment and order prescription refills. Take a look. |
Syndromic Surveillance System
The Institute is one of the first ambulatory care networks to integrate clinical EHR data with a syndromic surveillance system. The Department of Health - Mental Health's (DOHMH) syndromic surveillance system, established in 2002, monitors emergency department visits to detect disease outbreaks early. Routinely collected chief complaint information is transmitted electronically to the health department daily, where it is analyzed for temporal and spatial aberrations. Respiratory illness, fever, diarrhea, and vomiting are the key syndromes analyzed. Statistically significant aberrations are investigated to determine their public health importance. However, most bioterrorism agents and infectious disease epidemics of concern have a non-specific prodrome – a period when mild symptoms occur before the time when patients with more serious symptoms appear in ERs and hospitals. Detection of patients during this prodrome would provide health departments with an early warning that may enable them to identify individuals who have been exposed and institute control measures to limit morbidity and mortality.
To enable this type of detection, the Institute has linked ambulatory EHR data from its practice sites to DOHMH’s syndromic surveillance system. The Institute implemented the Public Health Information Networking Messaging System (PHIN-MS) – a secure encrypted data transfer mechanism by which daily data abstracts are transmitted to the health department. Every night, data on roughly 600 patient visits are downloaded to DOHMH. The data are compared to data from prior periods in previous years, and geospatially analyzed to detect any “outbreaks” of new symptoms or diseases. Early identification of illness in our practices can help the entire community.
CQI
Through a process of continuous quality improvement (CQI) we analyze patient health records data in Epic using multiple levels of care and/or disease characteristics. Results obtained lead us to the next level of success or to further evaluation. The cycle repeats as we make every effort to provide the very best of services and care. Our CQI Newsletters have articles on these efforts.
HIT Articles
"Institute for Family Health Tracks Communicable Diseases and Improves Population Health Through IT" Read an interview with Dr. Neil Calman on the Web site of HIMSS (Healthcare information and Management Systems Society) Jan 16, 2008. Go to the site and then scroll down to "Five Questions."
EHRs and Racial Disparities Read an article by the Commonwealth Fund, "Case Study: Institute for Urban Family Health - Using Information
Technology and Community Action to Improve the Health of a
Diverse Patient Population" May 2006. |
