While the state drink of Wisconsin is officially milk, many adults would argue that it’s actually the brandy old fashioned (warning: slight rabbit hole with the history in that link). Now, if we offered you a nice Wisconsin brandy old fashioned (after 5 p.m., of course) and asked you to divide it back into the five ingredients that make the drink, you’d probably look at us like we were crazy. But that’s what meeting quality measures is like when all your information is stored in an unstructured blob.
The challenge? You need discrete data. (Think ingredients.) The next challenge? Making it natural for providers to record that data within the context of their normal workflows (i.e., while they’re mixing the drink). Working with Piedmont Healthcare, Nordic proved how an agile approach to meeting two particular quality measures not only worked for their short-term physician quality reporting system (PQRS) and electronic clinical quality measures (eCGM) needs, but could also be applied to almost any quality measure they choose to tackle next.
Piedmont Healthcare’s challenges
Piedmont Healthcare came to Nordic looking to meet the needs of the Piedmont Clinic, a clinically integrated network of physicians. At the time, Piedmont was unable to provide enough metrics to meet the regulatory requirements around an accountable care organization (ACO). Additional metrics were also needed to support eCQM and PQRS.
Goals, process, and (gasp!) alerts
Solving for regulatory requirements or quality measures starts with the basics: What are we trying to achieve? From there, we validate the necessary data to achieve those goals. This is where deep Epic expertise is extremely valuable. We understand how and why clinicians document care, listen to the nuances of each specialty, and ensure the key data elements are discrete to support reporting.
