Behavioral Health Integrator

June 18, 2024, Session 4: Applying This to Practice

As health centers engage with more quality programs through payers, funders, and others there is a pressing need for health center staff to have a foundational understanding of clinical quality measures, quality programs, and how these fit together and fit into the patient care provided in health centers. This learning collaborative is appropriate for health center personnel looking for a simple, foundational understanding of the quality measures and related programs.

Over the course of four structured virtual learning sessions, participants will engage with subject matter experts and their colleagues in peer-to-peer learning and discussion. Topics will include: clinical quality programs and clinical quality measures, the anatomy of a clinical quality measure, assessing data alignment, and how to apply these approaches to the health center setting.

Primary care plays a key role in ending the HIV epidemic. The Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative launched across HHS in 2019, setting forth four key strategies also called the “four pillars” of ending the HIV epidemic. Primary care in federally qualified health centers figures centrally into these efforts, evidenced by the addition of several HIV screening and prevention measures and metrics in the Uniform Data System (UDS) reporting. This webinar reviewed the outcomes of the first year of HIV Screening and Prevention reporting on the UDS, highlight opportunities for quality improvement, and discussed funding opportunities.

This video is to assist health centers and health center program stakeholders access and read the eCQM specifications in order to support clinical quality measure reporting on the Uniform Data System (UDS).

Health centers have the power to analyze their UDS data through the HITEQ UDS Clinical Quality Dashboards, which were recently updated with the latest UDS data to include 10 years' worth of clinical information. HITEQ hosted a webinar to learn about the multiple ways that the dashboards can present your organizations’ clinical data across years, and compare it to customized comparison groups of other health centers, to explore potential drivers of results. The HITEQ UDS Clinical Quality Dashboards have evolved and improved each year to provide new analysis options. The Dashboards present the UDS data in a flexible and readily understandable graphical format and deliver an organization-specific version of the content to each health center, HCCN, and PCA via a web interface built on Tableau. Each organization's access allows them to see the data relevant to their center while protecting the data of other organizations.

Health centers, HCCN, and PCAs joined HITEQ to see how the dashboards can provide them with data to answer many questions such as: 

• As a homeless health center, how does our clinical quality compare to homeless health centers nationally?
• As a small health center, which we choose to define as those with <10,000 medical patients, does it appear that our size is a driver of our clinical results compared to other health centers?
• How have the trends in my clinical outcomes over the past 5 years compared to similar health centers in states that I consider relevant to mine?

This Guide provides focused documentation to assist users of NextGen software to improve the process of assessing, documenting, tracking, and following up on colorectal cancer screening. The Guide gives particular attention to assessment of personal and family risk and the tracking and follow-up of screening results that are not addressed in the standard NextGen guidance documents. This work aims to improve health center compliance with HRSA Uniform Data Systems (UDS) colorectal cancer screening (CRCS) through the development and implementation of workflows that produce accurate and reliable structured data and enable proactive outreach and timely follow-up with patients due for CRCS or follow-up testing. This optimization enables health centers to harness broader evidence-based strategies to improve CRCS compliance, and ultimately, health outcomes.