Featured Success Story from the Massachusetts eHealth Institute Regional Health IT meeting in Taunton, MA in October, 2013.

1. The Paperless
Path
A story of a little CHC that
could!

2. Why did we go paperless
 Improve
efficiency
 Improve documentation
 Patient Safety
 Improved information access
 Care-Coordination
 Blue Cross grant support
 Reporting

3. The Brockton Neighborhood
Health Center Story
 Started
in a church parking lot 1 physician
19 years ago
 Expanded to 2 story office with 10
providers. Administrative and dental
office in separate building
 Moved to new building 6 years ago- 40
providers, 26,000 patients and 150,000
visits per year.

4. MAEHC-Mass E-Heath
Coalition
 Founded
in 2004 with a BCBS 50 million $
grant to bring EHR technology to 3
communities
 Brockton chosen as 1 community (also
North Adams and Newburyport
 2005- vetting of systems,
 2006 GOLIVE with NextGen EMR/EPM

5. System Choice
 Practice
size/scalability
 Specialty support
 Reporting- quality and business reports
 User friendliness
 Plays well with others
 Meaningful Use certified
 Amount of IT support needed

7. PRE-GO LIVE
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Choose a system- and pay for it
Map workflows- translate to EHR processes
TRAIN,TRAIN,TRAIN!
Decide on infrastructure
Decide on go live scheduling modificationsDecide how much data to abstract
Data conversion if using another EHR
Play with/test system in test environment
Pick a EHR Champion
Get a super-user group together to guide process

8. GO LIVE
 Cut
schedule by 50% for 1-4 weeks
 Have experts/superusers on hand to
trouble shoot and provide support
 Expect some problems- have backup
methods ready to go

9. Lessons Learned
 Keep
on track of workload(chart
completion, task completion, ect)
 Make sure reports are correct- vet them
 You cannot train too much
 Communicate- superuser group is a good
venue
 Try to keep template modifications to a
minimum- complicates upgrades

10. When the system goes down
 DON’T
PANIC
 Have backup worflows in place before
this happens (downtime packets)
 Have processes in place to backup data
 Don’t throw away paper forms (archive
them)
 Make sure data gets back into EHR when
it is back up (RX,problem lists, visit notes)

11. Success Story

12. EHR incentives
 Meaningfull
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

use:
$44,000 for medicare eligible providers
$63,750 for medicade eligible providers
Initial attestation that you are using a MU
certified system
Stage 1: some thresholds, some measures
simply require that you be able to report
data
Stage 2- more and higher thresholds
Stage 3- stay tuned!

13. Medicare ERX Incentive
 Thresholds
for # of ERX’s sent (low)
 Penalties for not participating (2%)
 Incentive is 0.5% of medicare billing
 Must submit G8553 code when submitting
and ERX on a medicare patient

14. MEHI MEDICAID PROGRAM

15. What can MeHIdo for you?
 Funds
IOO’s (Implementation
Optimization Organization) to help
implement EHR use
 Funds consulting services to reach MU
(REC program)
 Implementation grants to help with care
coordination
 Educational services
(webinars/conferences/site visits)

16. Mass HIway
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The Massachusetts Health Information Highway (The HIway) will further
advance the Commonwealth’s goal to electronically connect all of its
health care community. The Commonwealth is working with public and
private partners to extend its existing technology infrastructure. The
HIway will be implemented in three phases.
Phase One will support the direct connectivity among health care
providers.
Subsequent phases will support the analysis of protected health
information (PHI) to better manage the quality and cost of care
delivered; and query and retrieval of information across the health care
community to achieve the best possible care coordination for
Massachusetts residents.
When fully developed, The HIway will provide a mechanism for the
Commonwealth’s entire health care community—
residents, providers, public health officials and others—to have
appropriate access to health information

17. FUTURE DIRECTIONS
 Mass
HIway connection- case
management project with Network
Health
 MU Stage 2
 Patient Portal
 Electronic Dental Record (go live 10/1)
 UPGRADE
 Improve patient education software
 Improve quality reporting
capacity/accuracy