Using electronic health records to collect patient-specific performance measures and outcomes

It is clear that performance measurement and quality outcomes are increasingly linked to reimbursement as is EHR adoption. We discuss the role of the secondary use of EHR data in the effort to make measuring and reporting of patient-specific processes and outcomes more efficient. Governance issues, workflow consistently and technical challenges remain obstacles as institutions that have implement EHRs try to obtain high quality data for quality initiatives. Through an interactive workshop, we will explore the role of a multi-disciplinary group at our institution in leveraging our EHR-based clinical data repository to design and implement algorithms for rapidly deriving, validating and delivering patient-specific performance measures and outcomes related to quality improvement projects. Our measures are based on widely-accepted national guidelines. Finally, we will focus on overcoming governance and clinical workflow challenges, extending investments already made in the health IT infrastructure and developing a team to manage the complexity of secondary use of EHR data to measure and impact on quality.