HEALTHeLINK has a long history of collaboration with its local healthcare community and is continually working to optimize the content and performance of its HIE to support population health and other quality improvement initiatives in Western New York.
For providers to offer the safest, most cost-effective, highest quality care, they must have their patients’ most accurate clinical information readily available.
With more providers and organizations connected to HEALTHeLINK, patient data from participating hospitals’ and providers’ EMRs were being sent to the HIE in different ways. The quality of patient information that is accessed via HEALTHeLINK and used for quality measures reporting is dependent upon the quality and completeness of the information received from its data sources.
In an effort to close data gaps and increase quality of both clinical and nonclinical information, HEALTHeLINK has introduced a new “scorecard” tool focused on working collaboratively with participants to improve the quality of data captured at the point of care. Each scorecard is tailored to the specific hospital or physician office and contains information about types, completeness, and quality of the data being provided. And this feedback can then be used to modify workflow and technical integration to close the gaps.
HEALTHeLINK introduced the scorecards to participating hospitals in 2017 providing a snapshot of what types of clinical records and other documents the data source is currently uploading to the HIE, the data gaps that exist, along with a peer comparison and overall score. The peer comparison includes all other hospitals that are current data sources to HEALTHeLINK. Hospitals also received a scorecard on the quality of ADT (admission, discharge and transfer) data by evaluating and scoring the data elements in the ADT that are critical to the alert notification function. This scorecard includes the type, number and percentage of errors (missing data) in each category along with an overall score and peer comparison among other participating hospitals. The scorecards were well received by the hospitals and, in certain instances, resulted in the quick remediation of data gaps or quality concerns.
HEALTHeLINK is introducing scorecards grading the inbound C-CDAs using the Common Clinical Data Set as the basis for scoring to hospitals and participating practices in 2018.