Boise clinics are continuing to discover the power of their EHR reports

As participants in Qualis Health's Using Your EHR to Improve Care project, the four Boise-area practices that comprise St. Luke's Internal Medicine (SLIM) have made strides in improving their EHR-based documentation, and successful provision, of immunizations and cancer screenings.

Given the host of workflow changes and other creative solutions that the practices took to move their rates in the right direction, it's easy to overlook the first step that got this work off the ground—pulling the appropriate data from the EHR.

"Seeing how Qualis Health formatted the data into a run chart was really helpful," Marilyn Edmondson, RN, the Clinical Integration Coordinator at SELECT Medical Network of Idaho, said. (The SLIM practices are SELECT Medical Network members.) By adapting the run chart format slightly, she was able to present monthly unblinded reports to the SLIM board and each of its sites so that they could more closely monitor their progress.

Getting that information into the right hands made a big difference. After reviewing the reports at the board meetings, SLIM's medical director became motivated to champion the work. "She really began dogging the physicians," Edmondson said. In addition, they discovered that simply providing the doctors with the data wasn't sufficient to drive change. Posting the reports in a prominent position within the practice brought the issue to the attention of all staff members—and provided a platform for everyone to suggest ideas and bring about improvements. "We're learning a lot about teamwork, about the group dynamics of how each person in the practice impacts patient care," Edmondson noted.

At SLIM's Jefferson Street practice, staff have even posted project reports next to the scales so that patients can see them when they weigh in—and start a dialogue about the importance of immunizations and cancer screenings.

"Qualis Health really understands the power of this type of data, and now all of our staff are beginning to see it, too." Edmondson said. "It's one of those things you don't really "get" until you've been through the process....Until the doctors experience it, and see the trends on their own, they don't fully understand how powerful those reports are."