Study: Health IT needs to evolve to enhance PCMH care coordination
The health IT needs of patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) must evolve from digitized patient record repositories into interoperable electronic collaboration platforms to further develop care coordination efforts, according to a study published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The study was based on interviews with 28 participants—including administrators, clinicians, EHR and HIE representatives and policymakers—from three PCMHs in the U.S.
According to the study participants, there are currently several areas that need to be addressed in order to improve care coordination using current health IT tools, including monitoring patient populations, notifying clinicians and other staff when specific patients move across care settings, collaborating around patients, reporting activities and interoperability.
The study authors suggested that focusing technological solutions in these areas “can offer transformative approaches to improving care coordination and quality.”
Their recommendations for each of the five areas included:
- Monitoring: Develop tools that filter patients by condition, and target clinical interventions that mitigate—if not prevent—poor outcomes
- Notification: Provide real-time notifications to PCMSs whenever a defined patient interacts with the healthcare system, particularly during care transitions
- Collaboration: Integrate messaging applications that help PCMH clnicins identify care gaps among generalists, specialists, and patients
- Reporting: Invent data extraction tools that enable PCMHs to efficiently report performance and quality metrics to internal and external stakeholders
- Interoperability: Look for ways that EHRs and HIEs can reduce interface costs.
PCMHs and health IT vendors should focus on these areas of need in order to improve ongoing and further care coordination efforts, the authors concluded.