The manual provides step-by-step guidance for medical directors and senior leaders at primary care organizations to implement quality improvement initiatives, with a special focus on using electronic health records to advance chronic disease management. The manual was developed following a two year project with Open Door Family Medical Centers (Open Door), a federally qualified health center (FQHC) with four practice sites in Westchester county, NY serving over 40,000 underserved patients.
The Open Door experience, described throughout the manual, demonstrates that hypertensive patients treated using a clinical decision support intervention were 1.5 times more likely to have controlled blood pressure than pre-intervention. Using this success as an on-the-ground model, the manual provides a systematic approach for designing, planning, implementing and evaluating a quality improvement initiative with a clinical focus. Specific goals of the manual include defining the project, setting quality improvement goals, assessing and understanding current data and technology capabilities, implementing change, and using data to evaluate and sustain improvements.
This project was supported by a federal grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ Grant #5R18HS017167) in partnership with PCDC, Open Door Family Medical Centers, New York University College of Dentistry and School of Medicine and Columbia University.