American Gastroenterological Association - Advancing the Science and Practice of Gastroenterology

Quality Improvement with EHRs, Patient Registries

The health-care industry has been saturated with news of the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), fueled by the government’s meaningful use incentives for adoption of EHRs. How will EHRs enable clinicians to improve the quality of care they provide and demonstrate this improvement to patients, purchasers and payors?

Significant challenges exist in making use of EHR data in order to enable quality improvement goals. Identifying quality improvement opportunities and proactively managing populations requires well-structured clinical data that are easily accessible. While many clinicians prefer documenting care using unstructured free-text notes and scanned documents, this type of information is difficult to sort and analyze in a manner that assists in quality measurement. An additional challenge exists in that many EHRs feature customizable templates. This can lead to clinical data that are unique to each practice. Additionally, even within these practices, care is not often documented consistently.

These challenges may seem insurmountable; however, there are well-established precedents for overcoming them. Specifically, patient registries have been used across specialties to standardize data and deliver tools to help clinicians identify gaps in quality, implement changes, and measure and report improvement. Registries can serve as standardizing agents among EHRs, creating common sets of clinical data that are interpretable across systems and designed with the needs of individual specialties taken into consideration. Quality and population management reports and alerts based on these universally understood data standards can then be delivered through the registry, enabling the proactive management of chronic conditions and benchmarking among peers for reference. Creating consistent quality standards makes it easier for clinicians to accurately demonstrate the value they provide to health-care consumers and payors.

The AGA Digestive Health Outcomes Registry™ is working with clinical systems used by gastroenterologists to create new standards for quality reporting in GI care. Participants in the AGA Registry can submit data using their EHR and then access real-time quality reports that support quality improvement and population management. Learn more about how the AGA Registry can integrate with your EHR, and visit the AGA Booth or AGA Store at DDW^® to view interactive demos and speak with registry staff.