Marrying public health and primary care coordination to improve population health using Health IT sounds like a no-brainer. It sounds easy, right? Maybe not, but a new initiative is bringing these three elements together in a bid to improve health, healthcare and control costs.
Doctors from Duke University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the de Beaumont Foundation put their heads – and their resources – together to build and launch the Practical Playbook.
“Health IT is essential to aggregate the vast amounts of information – data – so it can be used in a timely fashion to make health care decisions. Otherwise, you are just filling in the blanks,” says Jim Sprague, chair of the de Beaumont Foundation, the philanthropy behind the Practical Playbook. Sprague tells HealthIT Buzz: “What is this? It is local, state and regional primary care groups and public health pros who have partnered up to improve population health.”
The Practical Playbook of tools, resources and case studies that explain what happens when primary care, public health and Health IT work in concert, Julie Wood, MD of the American Academy of Family Physicians, explained.
Health IT is “the perfect bridge” to help create an information feedback loop between public health practitioners and primary care doctors in their communities, says the CDC’s Denise Koo MD, who serves on the steering committee for the Practical Playbook. It will help zero in on what we are doing right, Koo said.
The tool is summed up by the concept of a playbook, Sprague explains. “Your football team is over there, and I see what you’re doing, and I adjust my tactics. You see what I’m doing and you adjust. This is about bringing all the public health work to bear in the clinical world,” he said.
The first step of the playbook is this: Do you know the public health officer in your community? Does she know the primary care providers? The next step is where is the common ground between these groups and how are they communicating with each other, or are they?
One scenario
Right now there’s a community where there are four pediatric providers, each is seeing four uncontrolled pediatric asthmatics. Nobody can see that 16-person cluster, but what if we could? And that’s where the playbook comes in.
“Right now, that data lives in each of those three pediatricians EHRs. The playbook helps to bridge that gap,” says Brian Castrucci, chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation.
Public health people ID the cluster, and try and understand it. They work with the primary care providers and find out that the asthma patients all ride on the same bus – a bus that has a faulty (and dangerous) exhaust system. None of these things are obvious to the clinician, but together, they can target the problem.
“The data are the key to this whole thing. If we don’t start using real-time data to identify and target real-time problems, we will not succeed,” said Castrucci, …read more
