Quality Improvement and EHRs

The vision of PCIP is to improve care quality through use of electronic health records (EHRs). This includes increasing rates of preventive services, such as cancer screenings, and better tracking of chronic disease measures and patient management. EHRs can help providers in a number of ways. Alerts can be enabled to remind providers that patients are due for certain screenings, such as colonoscopy or mammography. EHRs can also help providers and key staff target patients with chronic conditions that may have missed an appointment or are in need of a follow up visit to ensure they receive the recommended level of care.

PCIP Role in Quality Improvement
Certain NYC REACH member providers can send PCIP practice level data (with no patient-level information) which PCIP can send back to practices in the form of a “Dashboard” like the one below. Doctors can use this information to see how they are doing with patient care for a number of quality measures and adjust their workflow as necessary to make improvements. These dashboards can also help highlight any technical difficulties the practice may be having with proper documentation within the EHR.

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Below is a table that summarizes the progress of 51 small practices treating over 6000 patients that were receiving these dashboards over time. Time period 1 represents the percentage of patients that were either receiving the listed services or achieving the health outcomes while the practice was using paper records. Time period 2 shows improvement for all measures after using their electronic health record.

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PCIP is currently analyzing more such trends in health outcomes among the patient populations of member providers. For a listing of current PCIP Abstracts and Publications click here.