This webinar focuses on strategies to reach and serve special and vulnerable populations using telehealth. Special and vulnerable populations include Migratory, Seasonal, and Agricultural Workers (MSAW), Older Adults, people experiencing homelessness, people with limited english proficiency, and rural communities with limited access to broadband. We discuss building the awareness, knowledge, and ability of both patients and health center staff to successfully use telehealth to meet the needs of these important groups. Wealso share how telehealth promotes health equity and increases overall access to quality healthcare for special and vulnerable populations.

Origins and Ongoing Refinement of this Guide: The content in this resource is drawn from and builds on widely used CDS/QI tools and strategies that have evolved over the past decade. The HITEQ Center plans to continue refining this Guide based on input from users like you, so please consider sharing your feedback through the comment form.

Successful health IT/QI efforts require a firm foundation of people, process, and technology elements.

The outline depicted in the Approach to Health IT-enabled Quality Improvement graphic provides a step-by-step approach to analyzing and enhancing care processes targeted for outcome improvement. Section III provides guidance and tools on addressing each of these steps.

New guidelines from SAMHSA released in July 2020 are designed to improve coordination of care for patients in treatment for substance disorder, while protecting confidentiality against unauthorized disclosure and use of patient information. View this HITEQ webinar on changes to SAMHSA’s 42 CFR Part 2 rule (Part 2) which protects individuals receiving substance use disorder treatment by defining privacy and security requirements for written, electronic and verbal information. This webinar features expert presenters from the University of New Hampshire Institute for Health Policy and Practice and the Center of Excellence for Protected Health Information who present on the new final Part 2 rule and future changes in the CARES Act, including what has changed, what has not changed, what this means for health centers in regard to consents and disclosures, and the implications for care coordination. This presentation also addresses privacy considerations for tele-behavioral health and exceptions during the state of emergency waiver.

Electronic patient engagement technologies are having a significant impact on diabetes-related health outcomes and can help to increase patient to provider diabetes care plan involvement and communication. This HITEQ webinar explored use cases and strategies for effective adoption and evaluation of electronic patient engagement diabetes interventions within the health center setting.

This webinar discussed and demonstrated the newly developed web-accessible dashboards for the HITEQ UDS Clinical Quality Analyses which contain a variety of visual and data views of the information reported in the UDS across time and across measures, providing both individual and network organization levels of content, including comparison to other groups of health centers.  The information presented is specific to the organization that is logged in and content will vary based on the type of organization.  The webinar covered accessing the dashboards, the content available, manipulating the views, interpreting the results, and where to find additional tools and resources based on the information found. 

This HITEQ Highlights webinar discussed the use of health information technologies (IT) to facilitate the workflow of providing Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) services. Focus areas included: coding and billing for SBIRT services, using health IT to enhance SBIRT screening, communication, data capture and documentation, clinical decision support, and information sharing and reporting. The webinar presented examples and experiences of health centers currently using health IT to facilitate effective SBIRT service delivery.

While nearly all health centers have reported the use of electronic health records, only 38 percent are utilizing some type of telehealth technology, most notably to provide mental health services. Despite significant research that telehealth is as effective as in-person visits, there are still many barriers to its use, including the lack of consistent visit reimbursement, technology costs, broadband availability, and resistance to changes to workflow.  This webinar discussed the current state of telehealth use by health centers and the barriers to implementation and use and introduced participants to the national and regional Telehealth Resource Centers (TRCs).

Are you capturing information like immigration or refugee status, intimate partner violence, human trafficking, risk of acquiring HIV through sexual contact or substance use disorder, or other information that brings up questions about how to document or code while respecting the patient’s privacy?

This health center learning collaborative series will present health center case examples that explore the privacy and data sharing considerations of EHR documentation of sensitive patient information, such as social history and social risk, and encourage participants to discuss the implications for health centers and their patients.