$398,049
Applying Health Information Technology to Improve Medication Management
Qualis Health
Collaborating.organizations: ChartConnect, OneHealthPort
Jeffrey Hummel, Medical Director for Healthcare Informatics at Qualis Health, works with the federally funded DOQ-IT project, for which he and his team have developed a Lean training adapted to the needs of ambulatory care. This work is supplemented by information technology activities at the state and national levels. Dr. Hummel was selected by the Health Care Authority to serve on the State's Health Information Infrastructure Advisory Board. His 28-year internal medicine career, including rural practice in the Palouse, and both Group Health and University of Washington clinics in downtown Seattle, has given him a unique perspective on clinical practice.
Medication errors are a major problem in clinical medicine, and they account for the majority of patient safety problems in ambulatory settings.
The goal of this project is to define the business case for using technology to improve the medication reconciliation process as part of the ambulatory care workflow. In other words, we hope to improve patient care while making the job of clinic staff easier.
This project is a before-and-after controlled study of both the time required for, and the staff satisfaction associated with, the process of obtaining an accurate list of medications for patients 18 and older who present to emergency departments in the State of Washington, a setting in which medication reconciliation is expected to be both more time consuming and of greater importance than in other settings. We will include one group of emergency departments that have an electronic medical record linking them to ambulatory practices in their community, and one group of emergency departments that do not. We will explore approaches developed by two Washington companies, the Yakima-based EMR Chart Connect and One Health Port of Seattle. The intervention will be 1) to set up functionality to match patient identity with the national RxHub data base and receive immediately a list of medications with dates the patient has received them from a pharmacy chain or mail-order PBM, and 2) a staff training designed to optimize the medication reconciliation workflow using "Lean" process redesign principles that eliminate unnecessary wasted effort and maximize the efficiency of the process.
See also:
| May 12, 2010 | Stimulus Grant Awarded to Assist HIT Use in Washington & Idaho |
