Staff at Open Door Family Medical Center in Ossining, N.Y., last month were preparing for a site visit to determine whether they would land a HIMSS Davies Community Health Organization (CHO) award this year.
But whether they come away with an award or not, it's clear IT is helping them provide better care to their patients.
Open Door has four health centers in Port Chester, Ossining, Mount Kisco, Sleepy Hollow and four school-based health centers in Port Chester, which serve a patient base of almost 35,000 patients – primarily the working poor.
All of its sites are connected through an electronic health record developed by Westborough, Mass.-based eClinicalWorks (eCW) – a connection that is a key aspect of what the HIMSS team will be looking for when it conducts its site visit, says Brian Jacobs, MD, who served as a chair of the Davies Organizational Award Committee from 2006-2009.
"We make sure that care is indeed seamless so that a patient's records can be accessed no matter which site they walk into to receive care," said Jacobs who is also the president, CMIO, and executive director at the Center for Pediatric Informatics, Children's National Medical Center in Washington.
Open Door is currently the only finalist in the CHO category, but it is not the first time staff has prepared for a site visit. It is their third year applying for the award. Last year Open Door was a finalist, but it did not land the prize.
If Open Door does not win this year, leaving the CHO category without a winner, it will be the first time in HIMSS Davies' history that a winner wasn't named for a category, confirmed David Collins, HIMSS director, Healthcare Information Systems.
Lindsay Farrell, president and CEO of Open Door, said this year when applying for the award the center highlighted its ability to query data.
She says this ability is in part a result of Open Door’s participation in a project being funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, which is evaluating how clinical decision support and an EHR-linked registry can improve the management of hypertension in community-based health centers. Farrell says that some of the funding Open Door received for the project was used to map eCW to an application called BridgeIt that allows the staff to "query an infrastructure field within our client database." This has been a very powerful tool and given them a "leg up,” she says.
Farrell says the ability to query data was also highlighted in Open Door’s application because of its role in helping it achieve Level III of the patient-centered medical home, the highest level of recognition by the National Committee for Quality Assurance. She says attaining this level would not have been possible without the ability to query data with ease.
When HIMSS conducts its on-site visits the team is looking at EHR workflow and whether it can directly attribute greater efficiency to the EHR system," says Collins. This is what "bumps them over the edge to becoming a winner."
"In general, when the teams visit, they are looking to clarify any gaps from the written application process and to verify that what was described in the application is actually happening in real life and that something that wasn't even mentioned would cloud the decision to make an award," added Barbara Drury, who serves on the HIMSS Davies Ambulatory Award Committee.
More often then not, it is the application that underestimates what has been accomplished, says Jacobs.
"When there is an award program that involves mutli-disciplinary sites, the visit lends validity and credibility to the award itself,” he said. “The site visit process lends an element of credibility to what is otherwise something that is just put down on paper.”
HIMSS will announce all of its Davies award winners in mid-September.
