What You Should Know: - AHRQ conducted a study to address the operational gap between CFIs and EFIs. This project focused on validating an established CFI using linked claims-EHR databases of multiple large health systems. The project provides a systematic approach that health systems can use to examine the quality of the EHR data and prepare it for the application of EFI measures. - The findings demonstrated that structured EHR data can be used by healthcare providers to identify frail
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AHRQ
Why Patient Portal Usability is Critical to Patient Experience
Improving patient experience is a primary concern for behavioral health providers today. A positive patient experience can keep clients returning, while a frustrating or confusing experience may push them away. With so much on the line, it’s important to get it right. One of the most powerful tools in a behavioral health practice’s arsenal is a user-friendly, highly functional patient portal. These portals are often clients’ main point of connection to a practice outside of appointments. What
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MedStar Health Awarded $2M Telehealth Research Grant
What You Should Know: - MedStar Health has received a nearly $2 million telehealth research grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to expand its research collaboration with Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare focused on telehealth access, safety, and equity. - The grant will allow researchers to establish a patient safety learning laboratory over a four-year funding period to apply a cross-disciplinary, human factors and systems
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Nuance & Covera Launches Nationwide Radiology Quality Care
What You Should Know: - Covera Health, Inc. and Nuance Communications, Inc., today introduced the Quality Care Collaborative (QCC), the first national program that brings together payers, providers, and self-insured employers to support radiology quality improvement initiatives at scale. - The QCC joins Covera’s clinical intelligence platform and Nuance’s Precision Imaging Network™ to enable providers, payers, and employers to work together in a
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11 Best Practices of a Successful Care Model Transformation Plan
Health systems across the country will require a plan to react to government deep spending cuts and revenue shortfalls due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospital services have seen a significant downturn in demand in 2020, and the recent resurgence in cases has led to further decreases. The public health emergency has also resulted in innovation, most notably telehealth, which has been granted temporary pay parity during the pandemic. Still, hospitals and health systems face a year of losses, but
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AHRQ and Google Pilot New Tool to Help Patients Plan for Medical Visits
What You Should Know: - Built-in collaboration with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Google is piloting a new tool to help patients plan for medical visits. - The new Google visit planning tool makes it easy for patients and those who care for them to privately list and prioritize their questions in preparation for a medical visit. - The suggested questions, developed by AHRQ as part of its “Questions are the Answer” initiative, is designed to get people thinking
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Reducing Preventable Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Events
Using a Health Information Exchange (HIE), clinicians across multidisciplinary care teams can access a patient’s medications, reconcile the list and monitor their progress, thereby reducing medication errors and future costs from preventable hospital admissions. Multiple factors combine to make the prescribing, supplying and taking of medications a perilous and costly issue for patients and the healthcare sector. Prescription medication use is by far the most common health intervention.
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AHRQ Report: Mobile Apps Have Little Clinical Evidence of Improving Diabetes for Patients
A new report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) on mobile phone applications for diabetes patients reveals that out of hundreds of commercially available apps, only 11 had been researched, and of these, only five were associated with clinically significant improvements in levels of blood sugar control as measured by hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) tests.Report OverviewAHRQ-funded researchers sought to understand the effectiveness of roughly 280 apps that may be used to support
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EHR Usability for Ongoing Optimization
Dr. Stephen Beck, CMIO at Mercy Health (formerly Catholic Health Partners) discusses how his organization is approaching EHR usability to deliver improvements in efficiency, care quality and provider satisfaction. Nearly every day I read a new article about physician dissatisfaction with EHRs. There seems to be many reasons for this attitude. Part of it is the need for better data collection tools to ensure ongoing optimization to keep pace with changing regulations. For example, an October
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12 AHRQ Funded Meaningful Use Stage 3 Projects to Watch
An in-depth review of 12 AHRQ funded meaningful use stage 3 projects to watch that will help shape MU stage 3 final objectives.
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