Unlocking EHR Data to Accelerate Clinical Quality Reporting & Enhance Renal Care Management

The following is a guest blog post by Christina Ai Chang from DaVita and Vaishali Nambiar from CitiusTech Inc.
Christina and Vaishali
When healthcare providers began achieving Meaningful Use (MU) — the set of standards, defined by CMS, that allows for providers to earn incentive dollars by complying with a set of specific criteria — a health IT paradox emerged. The reports required for incentive payments are built on data the EHR captures, however, EHRs don’t typically have built-in support for automated reporting. This places a time-intensive manual burden on physicians as they report for MU quality measures. In other words, a program intended to increase the use of technology inadvertently created a new, non-technical, burden. The need to manually assemble information for reports also extended to the CMS Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) incentive program. As with many providers, EHR reporting shortcomings for these CMS programs severely impacted the kidney care provider, DaVita Healthcare Partners, Inc. (DaVita).

As one of the largest and most successful kidney care companies in the United States, DaVita has constantly focused on clinical outcomes to enhance the quality of care that it provides to its patients. In its U.S. operations that include 550 physicians, DaVita provides dialysis services to over 163,000 patients each year at more than 2,000 outpatient dialysis centers. These centers run Falcon Physician, DaVita’s nephrology-focused solution that largely eliminates paper charting by capturing data electronically and providing a shared patient view to caregivers within the DaVita network.

Falcon Physician serves DaVita very well in its design: renal-care specific EHR capabilities and workflows to support patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, federal incentive programs like MU and Physician Quality Reporting System posed their own challenges. Falcon, like most EHRs, did not have the sophisticated data processing and analytics capabilities needed to meet the complex clinical quality reporting mandated by these programs. With limited built-in support for automated reporting, DaVita physicians had to manually calculate denominators and complete forms for submission to CMS for quality measures reporting, typically taking five to six days per report. With the organization averaging 800 encounters per physician each month, this placed a highly time-intensive and manual burden on physician offices. In addition, manual reporting often resulted in errors, since physician offices had to manage ten or more pieces of data to arrive at a single measure calculation, and do that over and over again.

The Need to Automate Reporting – But How?

To address the time and accuracy issues, DaVita recognized it would need to unlock the data captured by the EHR and use an effective data analytics and reporting tool. To begin evaluating options, the organization put together a team to explore two potential paths: creating a proprietary reporting capability within the EHR, or integrating a third-party solution.

It became clear that proprietary development would be challenging, mainly because of the technological expertise that would be needed to build and maintain sufficiently advanced analytics capabilities. It would require special skillsets to build the rules engine, the data mapping tools, and the visualizations for reporting. In addition, DaVita would need to maintain a clinical informatics and data validation team to assess the complex clinical quality measures, develop these measures, and test the overall application on an ongoing basis. Further, DaVita would also need to get this functionality certified by CMS and other regulatory agencies on a periodic basis.

While looking for a third-party solution that could easily integrate with Falcon, DaVita came across CitiusTech, whose offerings include the BI-Clinical healthcare business intelligence and analytics platform. This platform comes with pre-built apps for multiple reporting functions, including MU and PQRS. Its application programming interface (API) simplifies integration into software like Falcon. The platform aligned closely with DaVita’s needs, and with a high interest in avoiding the expense, time and skillset hiring needed to build a proprietary reporting function, the organization decided to move forward with third-party integration.

Accelerated Implementation and Integration

Implementation began with a small proof of concept that delivered a readily scalable integration in fewer than six weeks. DaVita provided the database views and related data according to the third-party solution’s specifications. This freed DaVita not just from development, but also from testing, installation, and configuration of the platform; thereby, saving time and money, and creating a more robust analytics platform for DaVita’s physicians. In the end, going with an off-the-shelf solution reduced implementation time and cost by as much as two-thirds.

Integration with the third-party platform enabled DaVita’s Falcon EHR system to completely automate the collection and reporting of clinical quality measures, freeing up tremendous physician time while improving report accuracy. With additional capabilities that go beyond solving the reporting problem, the new solution translates EHR data into meaning performance dashboards that assist DaVita physicians in the transition to pay-for-performance medicine.

The platform with which DaVita integrated is ONC-certified for all MU measures for eligible professionals (EPs) and eligible hospitals (EHs). Falcon was able to leverage these certifications and achieve both MU Stage 1 and Stage 2 certification in record time. This also enabled Falcon to accelerate its PQRS program and offer PQRS reporting and data submission capabilities.

Automated Reporting and Dashboards in Action        

Today, hundreds of DaVita physicians use the upgraded EHR, and the integrated business intelligence and analytics function eliminates the need for these doctors to perform manual calculations for MU and PQRS measures. Where manually creating reports used to take five to six days, pre-defined measure sets now complete reports and submit data almost instantly.

With the manual reporting problem solved, DaVita’s physicians now take automation for granted. What they see on a daily basis are the quality-performance dashboards. These dashboards give them a visual, easily understood picture of how they’re doing relative to quality measures, and the feedback has been extremely positive. Many powerful reporting features are highly appreciated, such as key measurements appearing in red when it’s time to change course in care provision to meet a particular measure. Such information, provided in real-time with updates on a daily basis, has led to very strong adoption of the new reporting capabilities among physicians.

Currently, DaVita is working to develop a benchmarking tool that can rate all physicians within a location. The focus on quality-measurement rankings relative to their peers, with drill-downs to specific indicators such as hypertension and chronic kidney disease progression, will allow physicians to focus on enhancing care delivery.

Unlocking data located in the EHR has helped DaVita comply with MU and PQRS. In the coming years, the upgraded EHR will help physicians comply with evidence-based guidelines and optimize increasingly complex reimbursement requirements.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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