5 IT tactics of an Accountable Care Organization

May 4, 2012 by MassDevice

4. Universal availability of PHRs - engaging patients and families in their care, ensuring communication of care plans and achieving seamless handoffs, is essential to keeping patients well. BIDMC has offered comprehensive PHRs to all of its patients since 1999.

5. Decision Support Services - care management requires alerts, reminders, pathways, and guidelines. Ideally, all members of the care team will receive decision support inside their electronic record based on enterprise rule sets. At BIDMC, we've used the concept of Decision Support Service Providers to to turn data into knowledge and wisdom inside our EHRs and web applications.

Of these five tactics, the biggest challenge is defining the care management rules - what conditions, wellness measures, home care interventions, best practices, and evidence should be incorporated into the point of care and analytic systems? Yesterday, at the BIDMC Clinical IT Governance Committee, we agreed to to charter a working group of experts to set these priorities so that our care management strategy is well planned and not a random collection of individual projects, driven by individuals with specific niche requirements (squeaky wheels or siloed departmental requests). It's a good start.

In addition to his CIO role at BIDMC, Dr. Halamka blogs at GeekDoctor.blogspot.com.