Data Storyteller

With nearly 100% of community health centers utilizing electronic health records (EHR) to care for patients, focus has pivoted from implementation and new workflow development to enhancement in order to drive value and reflect patient needs and population trends. EHR technology presents potential opportunities and significant constraints. Providers frequently document and share potentially sensitive information in the EHR, such as risk for intimate partner violence (IPV), consistent offers of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), or patient sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Capturing such information can be immensely helpful in providing care tailored to individuals’ needs, but additionally challenges teams to develop workflows that keep the data private rather than risk harm to patients through improper or unintended disclosure.

In recent years, health centers have become increasingly interested in and charged with not only addressing the health concerns of their patients, but centering and responding to patient’s social needs. According to Healthy People 2030, social needs, also known as the social determinants of health, are the conditions in the environments where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Social needs encompass the quality of and access to resources such as housing, transportation, safety, employment, food, and more. Identifying and addressing unmet social needs as part of the clinical encounter provides the opportunity to deliver higher-quality, whole-person care, advance population health, and reduce healthcare costs.

Now more than ever, health centers know that addressing social determinants of health is key to ensuring patients from underserved and disadvantaged groups receive quality, informed, and comprehensive care. This resource explores how health centers can effectively and safely collect critical patient information, including sensitive information like social need screening, through digital patient intake solutions that rely on paper-free, data-smart registration and EHR integration. Health centers can walk through why adding these solutions to their clinics can engage rather than alienate patients, and how to implement these technologies to screen for social risk and improve the patient experience.

The resource is available in the Documents to Download section below.

This is a list of key words and phrases that can be used to pre-screen resumes for HIT/QI jobs to help quickly identify candidates for an additional screen.

This resource provides a list of sample questions that can be used to interview job candidates. The questions are organized into four categories: 1) questions for HIT staff positions; 2) questions for quality improvement staff positions; 3) questions for either position; and 4) questions for senior HIT or Quality positions.