National Web-Based Teleconference
Quality Metrics and Measurement

This free 90-minute teleconference will explore the use of health IT applications to improve patient involvement in the management of their health and health care.

This registration page is for MD's and DO's. Nurses, PA's, and other Health Care Professionals please click here to register so you receive the correct CME certificate.
 
Date: April 28, 2011
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 p.m., E.S.T.
Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health IT

Presenters:

• David Baker, M.D., M.P.H., is Michael A. Gertz Professor in Medicine, division chief of general internal medicine, and director of the REACH practice-based research network at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.  He has served as a member of the Health Information Technology Expert Panel’s (HITEP) Quality Data Set Subcommittee, the Physicians’ Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) Measure Implementation and Evaluation Subcommittee, and the American College of Physicians’ Performance Measure Technical Advisory Committee. His research has focused on health literacy, racial and ethnic disparities in care, and quality of care for chronic diseases. His current research is examining use of health information technology for health communication, quality measurement, and quality improvement.

• Andrew Hamilton, R.N., B.S.N., M.S., is chief operating officer and director of clinical informatics at the Alliance of Chicago. Mr. Hamilton is a masters-prepared nurse informaticist with 12 years experience in both in-patient nursing care and outpatient community health as well as nursing administration. As the director of clinical informatics, Mr. Hamilton develops clinical decision support and national clinical performance measures for the organization’s electronic health records (EHRs) and meaningful use efforts. Currently, he serves as the immediate past president of the Board of the Centricity Healthcare User Group (CHUG) and is also a member of several local, State, and national EHRs and performance measurement-related work groups. In addition, Mr. Hamilton is an adjunct faculty at Loyola University School of Nursing, the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Nursing, and recently joined the faculty at Northwestern University’s medical informatics program. Previously, Mr. Hamilton was a pediatric critical care nurse and a member of a large academic hospital health IT team supporting the implementation of clinical information systems. He also served as the director of patient care services for Howard Brown Health Center.  Mr. Hamilton holds a B.S. in nursing and an M.S. in nursing business and health systems administration with a focus on nursing informatics, both from the University of Michigan School of Nursing.

• Mark Weiner, M.D., is an associate professor of medicine and a practicing internist for over 15 years at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Weiner’s research interests help to bridge the gap between health services research and medical informatics. Having completed training as both a VA General Medicine Fellow and a National Library of Medicine-sponsored fellowship in applied informatics, his work helps to create systems to adapt clinical and administrative data for research and quality improvement purposes. Dr. Weiner has overseen the technical development and uses of the Pennsylvania Integrated Clinical and Administrative Research Database (PICARD) system. He is also the director for information systems integration for research within the Office of Human Research, co-chief of the biostatistics and informatics core of the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, and co-chair of the Data Core of the FDA Mini-Sentinel initiative. His work on the medical home initiative at the University of Pennsylvania Health System helped him to formulate the goals of an AHRQ grant to apply routinely collected data with electronic health records to improve quality measurement.

Dr. Baker will present on the Utilizing Precision Performance Measurement to Improve Quality (UPQUAL) project, which targeted four chronic diseases and five preventive services for physicians to achieve ultra-high levels of performance. He will describe the rationale, provide an overview of the intervention, and present the changes in performance after 1 and 3 years. Mr. Hamilton will present findings from the AHRQ-funded project, “A Partnership for Clinician Electronic Health Record (EHR) Use and Quality of Care.” He will focus on quality indicators, identified by the Institute of Medicine, for areas of improvement through rigorous quantitative methodology.  Lastly, Dr. Weiner will explore the findings and implications of the AHRQ grant to use EHR data to improve quality measurement. With a focus on diabetes, Dr. Weiner will describe shortcomings of the existing HBA1c-threshold-based quality measure and propose an alternative measure that credits providers who are performing better than expectations.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe how current quality measurement systems will be used going forward under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and what changes will be implemented.
2. Demonstrate the role of health IT in quality measurement and reporting.
3. Describe how health IT can be used to improve health care quality. (Physicians)
4. Identify health IT strategies to implement in their (physicians’) practice to improve health care decisionmaking, support patient-centered care, and improve the quality and safety of medication management.

The Wisconsin Medical Society is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The Wisconsin Medical Society designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 CreditsTM.  Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.