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.

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

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.

Health Centers are made up of many different levels of IT Security & Privacy expertise, both in terms of staff skills and organizational maturity. This resource will help guide both beginners and more advanced staff and leadership to understanding how to best manage and promote security and privacy risk management at their health center.

The objective of this learning opportunity is to help health centers begin, and make progress along, the path of using social determinants data to address population health using HIT.  This webinar will provide participants with an understanding of population health management and the social determinants of health from a HIT perspective, and their relevance for health centers.  We will present real-world examples of health centers’ successful use of social determinants data to implement population health management and improve quality.  Participants will be introduced to a “Roadmap for Use of Social Determinants Data”, to guide them in the foundational steps of using social determinants data for HIT to drive population health. 

The role of the consumer/patient is experiencing a significant change within healthcare in which the point of diagnoses and care is being increasingly shifted from the classical care provider setting to a more patient-centered model of health services. This shift in perspective and responsibilities is largely being stimulated by a critical mass in personal health information technology innovation and development, including patient portals, health apps, web-enabled medical devices, and personal fitness and health monitors. Health Centers are very aware of the benefits of patient activation and engagement, but at times need assistance in navigating 1) related regulations associated with policies such as Meaningful Use; 2) incorporation of patient engagement tools and strategies into the organizational workflow; 3) evaluation of patient needs, satisfaction, and activation; and 4) current tools and services available for electronic patient engagement. This webinar will cover the Health IT related policies, organizational changes, personal behaviors, and technical drivers that are converging to usher in a new era of patient empowered healthcare.

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. 

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).

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.

Health centers are interested in using social determinants data to manage and improve the health of their patient population and community, and are at different places on the population health management (PHM) and social determinants of health (SDH) adoption curve. The Protocol for Responding to and Assessing Patients’ Assets, Risks, and Experiences (PRAPARE) is a national effort to help health centers and other providers collect the data needed to better understand and act on their patients’ social determinants of health. In this webinar, the Colorado Community Managed Care Network (CCMCN), a Health Center Controlled Network (HCCN) highlighted a Tableau data dashboard that they have developed to help their health centers make decisions on population health management. They discussed the rationale for developing the tool, challenges and facilitators to integration, and how their health centers benefit from data sharing across Tableau.