Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

See the following -

AHRQ Announces Health IT Research Funding Opportunities

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | April 1, 2016

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) will be sponsoring research projects geared toward bettering health information technology, according to a public statement. Specifically, the agency seeks to support research for improving the safety of health IT to better inform policymakers at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)...

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AHRQ Grants Show Use Cases For Clinical Decision Support

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | August 15, 2013

Want to know how healthcare analytics is impacting healthcare right now? A new report published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published a new report highlighting findings and lesson learned through its awarding of grants through its Improving Quality Through Clinician Use of Health IT Grant Initiative, a portion of which demonstrates use cases for clinical decision support (CDS)...

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AHRQ Releases Draft Guide for Registry Interoperability: Does Public Health Have a Role?

On January 11, 2019, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a draft Addendum to the Third Edition of Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide called Tool and Technologies for Registry Interoperability. AHRQ has long written about registries - largely from a research standpoint - and I have been following this from afar for some time. This new guide is focused on helping those who both create and use registries understand the issue surrounding leveraging external data to improve registry completeness, accuracy, and usefulness. This report covers lots of ground and does a good job of summarizing important subtopics. Each chapter is overflowing with footnotes and sources.

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Applying The Lessons Learned In Other Industries To Health Care

Margalit Gur-Arie | KevinMD.com | May 22, 2014

While grappling with the costs and imperfections of our health care system in recent years, a multitude of experts in the field found it useful and enlightening to compare health care to a variety of more familiar industries, and to suggest that health care should adopt operational models that have been shown to work well in those other industries...

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Are Electronic Medical Records Worth the Costs of Implementation?

Tara O'Neill | American Action Forum | August 6, 2015

All of these potential advances could greatly improve health outcomes and help bend the health care cost curve. Unfortunately, these advances come with significant costs, both financially and in terms of personal privacy. Going forward, policymakers should work to ensure limited resources are used in a more cost-effective manner. Changes to EMR policy have been part of recent legislative and executive action.

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Clinical Data Registries Bill Advances In House Despite Opposition

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 30, 2014

A bill requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to publish recommendations for the development of clinical data registries was approved in a July 30 vote by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but not without sharp opposition from Democratic members....

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Creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for the ‘Learning Health System’

David Raths | KM World | September 14, 2017

The idea that the healthcare industry can study the data being created in electronic health records (EHR) to foster ongoing improvement is not a new one, but it is gaining momentum. A “learning health system” is one that commits to the use of data as a byproduct of care for continuous learning. Clinicians and health system researchers want to tackle perhaps their industry’s most significant knowledge management challenge: how to capture the results of research into clinical best practices and more quickly feed it back to doctors and nurses at the point of care...

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DeSalvo: America 'Waiting For Us To Get Interoperability Right'

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | September 3, 2014

Calling it a “changing of the horizon,” national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, said that her office is working to refresh the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.  “It’s an opportunity to look at HIT beyond the EHR and policy levers beyond meaningful use,” DeSalvo said of the forthcoming plan...

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ECRI Institute Committed to Building National Health IT Safety Collaborative

Press Release | ECRI Institute, Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), Pew Charitable Trusts | March 16, 2018

Building on the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety, a multi-stakeholder collaborative, ECRI Institute is now responding to the call for a national program focused on improving health IT safety. ECRI Institute, together with the Alliance for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (AQIPS), the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the Pew Charitable Trusts, sent a letter to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) informing them of their shared vision for a national health IT safety collaborative. The letter includes the key characteristics needed for its success.

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EHR Usability Gaps -- ONC and AHRQ Identify Serious Shortcomings of Certified EHRs

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provided providers with a significant financial incentive to increase the adoption and use of EHRs. EHR vendors were required to conduct and report on a summative usability evaluation of their system as part of the Stage 2 Meaningful Use program (The ONC 2014 Edition Certification). However, a recent report funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), identified several “issues” with the certified EHR vendors in the processes, practices and use of standards and best practices with regard to usability and human factors.

EHRs critical to 'learning health system' model

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | August 24, 2015

Electronic health records can help create network-based learning health systems to integrate chronic care management, quality improvement and research, according to a study published in the August edition of eGEMS (Generating Evidence and Methods to Improve Patient Outcomes).

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HHS Publishes FDASIA Health IT Report

Brian Ahier | Advanced Health Information Exchange Resources | April 3, 2014

HHS released a draft report that includes a proposed strategy and recommendations for a health information technology (health IT) framework, which promotes product innovation while maintaining appropriate patient protections and avoiding regulatory duplication. The congressionally mandated report was developed in consultation with health IT experts and consumer representatives and proposes to clarify oversight of health IT products based on a product’s function and the potential risk to patients who use it.

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HLN's Report on Patient Centered CDS Learning Network Conference

The Learning Network is an initiative funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) whose goal is to encourage collaboration and development of tools and resources to support clinical decision support (CDS) as it relates to individual patients and their caregivers. This work is an offshoot of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) initiative which focuses on the relationship between healthcare providers in patients in making better, more informed, healthcare decisions. A sister project to the Learning Network is the AHRQ-funded CDS Connect Repository which has begun to house shareable CDS artifacts which represent evidence-based standards of care.

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How are Clinical Decision Support Artifacts Tested Today?

In October 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about "The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)" and "Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure" to achieve it. The scope of this RFI is daunting. It might be useful, rather than to try to tackle this whole topic broadly but superficially, to take just one Clinical Decision Support (CDS) domain and show as completely as possible how testing is currently done.

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National Medical Device Registries Task Force Recommends Partnerships to Build National System for Medical Devices

Press Release | Weill Cornell Medical College | August 24, 2015

The federal government and stakeholders interested in device innovation and evaluation should support the creation of a comprehensive partnership on medical devices to monitor the products' performance after they become commercially available, a Food and Drug Administration-initiated and independent national group of experts is recommending in a report. The recommendations call for a master network of data in each clinical area where devices are used. Information on medical devices does exist — in registries, electronic health records (EHR) and claims data — but the disparate locations make it difficult for regulators, doctors and patients to understand and use it efficiently. Yet millions of patients undergo surgery each year and require some type of medical device during the procedure.

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