There are 3 Parts to this assignment.

In this assignment you will imagine yourself in the role of a recently hired Practice Manager for a physician office called Welby-EichmanhealthCare (WeCare). The practice is located in a small urban area; three of the physicians are Internal Medicine Physicians and the other two are Family Practice physicians.

You previously worked at LiveWell Medical Center as the HIM Manager and were on the front line there as they adopted and deployed EPIC at LiveWell South Physician Clinic, and this gave you a hiring advantage at WeCare.

WeCare physicians recently returned from a continuing education retreat which focused on physician practice quality improvement opportunities in medication management, and they have established specific medication related quality improvement goals for their practice.

Your priority one task is working with the office eHRso that the system can produce daily patient alerts, identify patient gaps and identify quality improvement opportunities for the physicians. The WeCare physicians want youto evaluate their options to meet their quality goals. WeCare outlines these options for you:

a) Use the current eHR which requires query creation and has no standard reports, Cost $0

b) Add a permanent IT person to office staff who can better use the current eHR, Cost $55,000 annually plus benefits.

c) Invest in a new, more user friendly, report focused e HR, Cost $1.5million

Part 1

You begin the task by researching and find the following article:

• Terry, K. (2015). Mining EHR data for quality improvement. Dermatology Times, 36(8), 51-52.
  

After reading the article, answer the following 7 questions below:

1. Another method of __________ __________ is to run the reports available in the EHR or to __________ __________ __________ you want and then run them.

Answer(s): data mining, write the reports

2. When you create a new health maintenance alert, you are mining your EHR data for a __________.

Answer(s): purpose

3. To produce custom reports, the practice's IT staff developed a special web -based application that __________ the EHR __________.

Answer(s): queries, database

4. The use of electronic registries to identify patient care gaps and the feedback of performance data to physicians for all of the __________ measures in the __________ Use incentive program and the PQRS.

Answer(s): quality, meaningful

5. Good data gets you __________ results.

Answer: actionable

6. PQRS is the acronym for what? ________________________________________

Answer(s): Physician Quality Reporting System

7. The article introduces the idea of an IT consultant. You consider a 4th possible option of bringing in an IT consultant to meet WeCare's quality goal. Write a short paragraph below, advocating for an IT consultant:

Do question 7

Part 2

You complete the article review and realize that you must understand more about the office's daily documentation practices at WeCare. You shadow Dr.Welby for a period of time and take notes. You make the following observations:

• Patients are registered by Mindy (medical assistant), Mrs. Welby (Dr.Welby's mom who works part-time as a coder), and by Dr.Welby's nurse, Sara, but only over lunch periods.
• Sara enters a brief free text note into the eHR for every new patient to summarize previous healthcaretreatments and medications.
• Dr.Welby updates the Medication Maintenance Record in the eHR for every patient he sees so that the eHR'sstructured fields are complete for every patient.

To get a variety of documentation practices, you also shadow Dr.Olisa for one afternoon who shares Nurse Sara with Dr.Welby. You make the following observations:

• Patients are registered by Mindy (medical assistant), Mrs. Welby (Dr.Welby's mom who works part-time as a coder), and by Dr.Welby's nurse, Sara, but only over lunch periods.
• Sara enters a brief free text note into the eHR for every new patient to summarize previous healthcare, treatments and medications.
• Dr.Olisa reviews Sara's entries to familiarize with a new patient's history, treatment and medications. (Dr.Olisa voted against the purchase of the current eHR because it was not user friendly and appreciates Sara's efforts in gathering pertinent patient information for each patient visit.)

Thought Question:

Your documentation observations have been very informative. Assess the difference in physician documentation practices found in a well written paragraph, state what the difference is and why it will impact the generation of quality reports generated by the current eHR and impact the WeCare quality goal.

Part 3

You continue your research and locate a regional consulting company called DoctorDocuments who specializes in SQL report writing for physician practices.

You present project specificationsto them,and DoctorDocumentssubmits a project cost estimate of $71,000 which includes 1) three standard reports that can be used by all physicians and allows for time period settings, 2) training for one person to run the reports plus 3) 80 hours of remote support for one year.

Based on your research and findingsplus your professional training and education in Health Information Management, evaluate the 4 possible solutions which might allow the physicians to meet WeCare's quality goals, then select the best two options and complete the recommendation below which you will present at the monthly WeCare Management meeting.

In the last column - "Considerations" - please evaluate what the practice needs for this solution to succeed.You must include a complete entry for each of these items as it pertains to the solution chosen: 1) current staff practices, 2) training, 3) policy and procedure, 4) time considerations - how long with this take to execute and finally 5) limitations and perks.

Recommendation for Management Meeting

References: Terry, K. (2015). Mining EHR data for quality improvement. Dermatology Times, 36(8), 51-52.