Goal: Improve Health Care Operations
Health care delivery and management in Vermont relies on and requires an array of data sets to support an ever expanding need for analysis of health system’s performance. Today, the needed data acquisition and aggregation are supported unevenly and inconsistently, and the burden often falls more heavily on smaller practices. Health care organizations may benefit from data that shows a patient’s health conditions over time. That information is even richer when health care providers can integrate additional information sources to understand how outside factors, like housing, education and food security, impact someone’s health.
Amy’s Story
Amy is a practice manager at a women’s health center in central Vermont. She knows that many of the patients that come into her practice have financial challenges which impact their ability to make their health a real priority. When she follows up with patients about why they’ve missed an appointment, she often hears stories that aren’t related to health such as, “my child is sick” or “my work schedule is unpredictable and I need to go in when they call me or I won’t be able to put food on the table” or “I can’t find a ride.” The providers in Amy’s office know that these issues exist, but without real data to demonstrate how pervasive the issues are, she has trouble getting both clinicians and the office staff to focus on anything unrelated to direct care.
Working with the practice’s appointment software, she figures out that she can run a report to show who has recently missed an appointment. She combines that knowledge with what she learns through the electronic health record system about the patient’s health conditions. Amy then conducts a phone survey of patient’s who have missed their appointments to find out what’s kept them from their health care. Pulling these three data sources together gives Amy data to really show how outside influences impact health. She uses the data to get staff excited about a practice-wide program that helps patients (who self-identify) find the resources they need, such as food an nutrition services.
Amy wonders if she can track how this program impacts the patient’s health overtime. She connects with an expert at a local health care association who tells her about analytics tools that can automate a lot of the data analysis Amy was doing by hand. She also learns how to ask her electronic health record vendor for the reports she needs and create a structure whereby the practice staff are tracking relevant patient information. Armed with the needed information, and a way to analyze it, Amy can now focus on quality improvement programs that target external issues impacting patients’ health.