Practice Transformation

OCHIN has nearly a decade of experience in implementing, optimizing, and supporting EHRs in hundreds of ambulatory care settings, with the overall mission of improving the health of all individuals. Prior to recent healthcare reform legislation and the announcement of the federal Meaningful Use standards, OCHIN was already advancing quality improvement and transformation of care initiatives.

OCHIN’s clinical quality measures recognize actual clinical data quality rather than claims data that was traditionally used prior to the advent of EHRs. OCHIN’s clinical quality data are being used in multiple local, regional and national quality improvement and clinical research venues. Examples are as follows:

• Several state payor-incentivized Primary Care Medical Home initiatives with accompanying quality measures
• State-specific Primary Care Associations initiatives to aggregate clinical measures for dashboard reporting/ comparisons
• Local quality-based programs rewarding clinics for quality care that leads to preventable admissions (outcome measures)
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation projects in many clinics recognizing and rewarding clinics for improving clinical quality measures, many of which are the same as ONC quality measures
• Many clinics are part of Accountable Care Organizations

Through collaborative learning OCHIN encourages using the EHR to extract the needed data elements for reporting and improving health outcomes.