The road to Meaningful Use (MU) is often met by obstacles for practices and health care organizations of all sizes. Dr. Michael Becker, a physician with the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), shared how his group overcame one of the challenges they faced.
“One IT challenge that our group faced was getting our physicians and medical students to document that they reviewed the allergy and medication sections on the patient's home page,” said Dr. Becker. “When we first reviewed our Meaningful Use measures, we saw that the physicians were initially scoring very low. Through the assistance of Bill Schmidt, our IT consultant, and Peter Mercuri, from PA REACH, we realized the importance of these two actual checks with each patient encounter.” Dr. Becker reported that the physicians and students received education to specifically acknowledge these two important quality measures, and as a result, PCOM’s MU report card grades improved greatly. “Most importantly, we have been able to teach our senior medical students about the important quality initiatives of verifying allergies and reconciling medications at every visit. This is a best practice clinical pearl,” explained Dr. Becker.
Ultimately, the solution to this issue was to simply display the measured data of each physician on a LCD screen during a Family Medicine department meeting. After every physician saw the low percentage scores, they reviewed how to improve by reviewing the procedure using test patients in our database. “Scores were then viewed again in the same fashion a month later and improvements were huge,” reported Dr. Becker.
When asked to share if there were any measurable outcomes that resulted from resolving this issue, Dr. Becker felt that it is difficult to objectively measure an outcome from this initiative. “One can easily see how reviewing allergies and reconciling medications each and every visit are simple and important patient safety measures. To my knowledge we have not had any major adverse reactions in any of our four sites. The fact that our patients' allergies and medications are current enables our EHR to use its designed clinical decision making tools to work effectively to prevent a dangerous outcome.”
The lesson learned from this initiative was that when allergies are consistently reviewed at each patient encounter it does prevent dangerous untoward effects from therapeutic interventions. The same can also be said for conducting a medication review at each encounter. “This review allows our EHR clinical decision making tools to alert the clinician about any potential drug-drug interaction or adverse drug reaction,” said Dr. Becker.
Overall, Dr. Becker has a very positive attitude about PCOM’s MU journey. "Meaningful Use is a difficult lesson. But, as we all learned in medical school and residency, the hardest lessons are the most important to master. Once these lessons are learned, patients and clinicians greatly benefit from all of the positive outcomes these educational processes produce."