Report outlines Beacon Communities' HIT use

A new report details the application of health IT and performance measurement infrastructure to achieve clinical transformation through the Beacon Community program.

Launched in 2010 by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program provided 17 awardees with $250 million over three years to build and strengthen their health IT infrastructure to support clinical transformation efforts.

ONC contracted with NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) to conduct an independent evaluation of the program.

According to the report, the Beacon Communities used health IT in routine clinical practice to improve the robustness of information for clinicians and consumers to use in delivering and managing care. All Beacon Communities implemented strategies to enhance IT-enabled care management.

Most communities (15 out of 17) used IT-enabled tools to provide clinical information at the point of service. These include targeted clinical decision support tools, care performance metrics at the physician level and access to population-level health statistics and associated analyses.

Communities used health IT as a central element in redesigning and streamlining clinical processes.

Nine communities provided technical assistance to help physicians conduct quality improvement (QI) reviews. Many communities developed community-wide learning approaches that engaged participating practices around a common QI curriculum, including learning collaboratives.

Communities leveraged existing resources and relationships to accelerate clinical transformation though strategic health IT investments. These include EHR systems and providers’ ability to use those systems and having IT departments with the capacity to make rapid changes to EHRs.

Among the challenges the communities faced was provider engagement. “Provider reluctance to participate in Beacon interventions was due to varying baseline capacity to undertake reforms, cultural resistance, competing priorities and resources and difficulty standardizing QI reporting measures,” according to the report.

So, communities developed assessments to determine baseline IT and workforce capacity, tailored clinical transformation approach, aligned goals with other local initiatives and engaged EHR and other software developers to standardize metrics and educate end-users on accurate data collection.

IT-related issues around standards for data exchange, technological capabilities and inadequate provider and staff training in health IT and EHR use slowed clinical practice reform efforts.

Communities collaborated with EHR and HIE developers to promote adequate training of and resources for staff in using health IT system software.

The goal for the communities was always to build and sustain long-term clinical transformation efforts. Some of their initiatives are now serving national demonstration programs while some of the communities have reorganized as autonomous community-based organizations to attain financial sustainability for key data infrastructure investments and clinical reforms that depend on electronic data.

Read the complete report.