The 2013 Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards: Co-Second Place Winner: The Louisiana Public Health Institute

Of course, none of this would be possible without the intensive participation of physicians, including physician leaders in the community like Eboni Price-Haywood, M.D., M.P.H., the co-executive director, CMO, and CIO of Tulane Community Health Centers (TCHC), the constellation of federally qualified health centers that is the core physician organization collaborating with the LPHI/CCBC on its community-wide patient-centered care initiative. Price-Haywood and her fellow physicians and clinic leaders have been working with LPHI since 2007, beginning with the winning of a primary care access stabilization grant in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and Price-Haywood in particular has been at the forefront in leading her physician colleagues to implement EHRs in order to participate in community-wide care and transitions management.

"In terms of moving forward towards population health management, one of the initial ideas was HIE optimization, and implementing the medical home; and obviously, all those things are connected, including to meaningful use,” Price-Haywood notes. “So we came up with a sub-project initially to look at NCQA’s [the National  Committee on Quality Assurance] 2011 standards, and basically creating a crosswalk between those standards and the software’s capabilities. You need to determine what your workflow will be in that system, and if the system has deficiencies, you need to change those.” Price-Haywood has helped lead her colleagues at TCHC adopt the EHR from the Birmingham, Ala.-based SuccessEHS.

A COMMUNITY-WIDE VISION
Thinking community-wide about care management and population health is one of the defining elements of what the LPHI, CCBC, and their collaborating organizations, including the TCHC, are doing these days. But what makes this collaboration worthy of Innovator Awards recognition is the combination of vision and scope on the one hand, and the successful leveraging of healthcare IT to achieve those visionary goals, on the other.

In the end, LPHI’s Khurshid says that four key steps must been taken in order to successfully leverage healthcare IT to support community-wide initiatives like this one. First is to engage physicians at the very outset, “and ask them what functionality they want. Then you go in and search for the best solution.” Second, he says, is “achieving the goals that have been set by the users.” Next is “working with the same partners on the processes that will make sure that the information created and the technology implemented can be used in a meaningful way. The final step is to measure things,” and to plow that measurement back into continuously improving clinical performance.

Only time will tell exactly how much of the vision of this initiative will ultimately be fully realized; what’s clear even now, though, is that strategically thinking visionaries like Anjum Khurshid, Maria Ludwick, and Eboni Price-Haywood will inevitably find ways to improve the health of their communities. ◆