A National Web Conference on Using Health IT to Enable Greater Care Coordination Across Acute and Outpatient Settings of Care

Overall Purpose:

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has identified a gap in health care and public health practitioners’ knowledge of health information technology (IT) using multiple mechanisms, including the findings of the continuing education (CE) planning group. Health IT provides new options for communicating information between multiple providers involved in a patient’s care. This series of Webinars is designed to increase practitioners’ ability to improve health care decisionmaking, support patient-centered care, and improve the quality and safety of care through the use of health IT.  This session will highlight various projects that seek to understand how improvements in care coordination may be achieved by leveraging electronic systems and modes of communication. Specifically, presenters will provide a summary of projects such as: the use of automated emails to notify both attending physicians and primary care physicians of a patient’s test results; findings from a randomized trial that implemented a care coordination information system to test the effect of patient outcomes, utilization, and overall quality improvement among disparate clinics stratified by team-based incentives versus traditional pay-for-performance reimbursements, and a broad study examining the impact of EHR use on care coordination and quality improvement.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the effects that care team cohesion may have on the optimal use of EHR systems to improve coordination and outcomes of patient care.
2. Discuss the impact of a multi-clinic, integrated care coordination system on patient outcomes, utilization, and quality metrics between two different reimbursement structures for patients with multiple chronic illnesses.
3. Describe how pending test result notifications at discharge are used to improve communication to both inpatient and ambulatory physicians involved in a patient’s care.

Event Materials:

• Presentation Slides (PDF, 5.27 MB)
• Recording of the Presentation (WMV, 72 MB)

CME/CNE credits were approved for those who attended the live event of this Web conference only. If you have any questions about obtaining CME/CNE credit for this webinar, please send an email to DigitalHealthcareResearch@ahrq.hhs.gov.