Childhood Obesity Preventer

The Performance Measure Data Definition Worksheet can be used during the Quality Improvement (QI) process to assess the alignment of your health center’s workflows and documentation and your EHR vendor’s reporting logic processes.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) EHR Certification criteria requires EHR vendors to use eCQM (electronic Clinical Quality Measure) specifications to define measures. Therefore, reported data for a measure should be consistent regardless of EHR vendor. In practice, however, it is important to confirm that your EHR vendor’s reporting logic is consistent with your health center’s definition and workflows, and vice versa, as outlined in this worksheet.

As of CDC's 2017 National Diabetes Statistics Report, 30.3 million people, or 9.4% of the total U.S. population, have diabetes. Of these 30.3 million, only 23.1 million are diagnosed—while the other estimated 7.2 million are undiagnosed. Additionally, more than 1 in 3 adults or 84.1 million people in the U.S. have prediabetes, including nearly half of people age 65 and older. According to 2018 UDS data, an estimated 15.1% of Federally Qualified Health Center patients nationwide have diabetes, an increase over recent years. Of these approx. 2.4 million plus patients living with diabetes, approximately 33% have uncontrolled diabetes, with HbA1c equal to or above 9% or have had no test in the year. This has remained relatively stable since 2016. These statistics bring forth the need for improvement in the care of diabetes; several resources and research outcomes are profiled here with specific takeaways for health centers.

This brief discusses the importance of integrated data, and provides examples of how other health centers have integrated and utilized oral health, colon cancer screening data, and other data within primary care.

The second of a three-part EHR Optimization series focused on establishing goals and expectations for optimizing EHR utilization and sharing proven strategy/tools for optimizing EHR utilization, including slides and related tools.

The first of a three-part EHR Optimization series focused on establishing goals and expectations for optimizing EHR utilization and sharing proven strategy/tools for optimizing EHR utilization, including slides and related tools. 

This worksheet is a key component of the Guide to Improving Care Processes and Outcomes in Health Centers, developed by TMIT Consulting, LLC and the HITEQ Center.

A helpful QI adage is that “systems are perfectly designed to produce the results they deliver.” This truism highlights the importance of understanding current care processes that are driving sub-optimal performance on the targeted measure so they can be refined to deliver better results. The CDS/QI worksheet supports this analysis through a structured, broadly applicable framework for documenting, analyzing, sharing and improving target-focused care activities.

It is sometimes difficult to know what target metric to focus on when beginning a quality improvement project. A prioritization matrix is a management tool that uses a simple framework to compare multiple options side-by-side using standard criteria. This version includes four criteria and can be adapted for your purposes.

Tools and resources pertinent to colorectal cancer screening from authoritative resources on the topic and organized by the change package outline. Some of these approaches and tools were used in the NACHC Improving Data Integrity, Access, and Analysis Project, which focused on applying data-driven strategies to improve colorectal cancer screening.

Data visualizations in many forms can be incredibly valuable in helping health center staff and leadership move from a passive understanding of the data to active support of health IT enabled, data driven quality improvement approaches. While introducing visualizations can create immediate value and understanding, ensuring that their full value is realized requires that stakeholders be fully engaged and understand how visualizations (such as dashboards) can support decision making.

The quality improvement (QI) approach outlined in this Guide can be used to augment current QI approaches used in your health center, or can serve as a placeholder QI methodology when there isn’t already a robust QI process in place.

It provides a framework and tools for documenting, analyzing, sharing and improving key workflows and information flows that drive performance on high-stakes care performance measures, and related improvement imperatives.

This webpage provides strategies and tools that health centers and their partners can use to enhance care processes and outcomes targeted for improvement, such as hypertension and diabetes control, preventive care, and many others.