News Briefs
AHRQ to develop guide for patient registries
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is developing a "how-to" reference guide to help health care organizations in creating patient registries to track the outcomes of medical treatments, including drugs. AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, MD, said she hopes the guide will help bring about wider use of registries in order to learn more about the effectiveness of specific medical treatments.
"Patient registries can play an important role as we build the foundation for evidence-based medical practice, and this guide will help ensure that registries produce useful results," Clancy said in announcing the project. "Registries can serve payers who need data for coverage decisions, and they can also serve more broadly to provide better information to support treatment decisions."
The guide, which is being developed as part of AHRQ’s new Effective Health Care program, will help both the government and private-sector entities in designing and operating successful registries. It also will provide criteria for evaluating registries and the quality of their data, as well as guidance on how registry data can be used to conduct valid scientific research.
The guide will help the Medicare program when it elects to provide coverage for a treatment accompanied by development of further evidence about the treatment. In some instances of such "coverage with evidence development," Medicare collaborates with health professional organizations and other stakeholders to provide expanded coverage for a medical intervention. One requirement is that the covered patients are enrolled in a registry so that further information about the appropriateness of treatment outcomes can be obtained.
The guide will be developed through an inclusive process that will call on the expertise of researchers and others who have successfully developed and used patient registries. Experts will submit a series of papers to inform the project, and a national workshop will be conducted.
The project will be organized by Outcome Science Inc. of Cambridge, MA, under a contract with AHRQ. Additional scientific advice will be provided by Duke University.
The reference guide on patient registries is to be completed by the end of 2006 and will reside on both the AHRQ and CMS web sites.
Information about the Effective Health Care program is available at www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov.
Film teaches HCWs the art of disclosing errors
A video on the art of disclosing medical errors, created by an ethicist at Emory University in Atlanta, is being made available for free on-line viewing.
"Discussing Unanticipated Outcomes and Disclosing Medical Errors" was created by John Banja, associate professor at Emory’s Center for Ethics, through a grant awarded to the Georgia Hospital Association Research and Education Foundation.
The video includes two parts. Part one features a panel discussion of three clinical vignettes involving medical error. The panel includes Banja, a hospital risk manager, and two health care attorneys. Part two explores empathic communication techniques that can be useful to HCWs when they have to deliver bad news to patients or family members. The video is available on the web site of the Partnership for a Health & Accountability at http://www.gha.org/pha/video/index.asp.
Cost called impediment to broader IT adoption
While nine out of 10 hospitals are using or considering using health information technology for clinical uses, most cite cost as a major impediment to broader adoption, especially for small or rural hospitals, according to a recent survey by the American Hospital Association (AHA).
The survey results suggest that the use of health IT in caring for patients is evolving as hospitals adopt specific technologies based on their needs and priorities, size, and financial resources. While most are still in the beginning stages, the survey shows hospitals are making investments in IT, in large part, to make gains in the safety and quality of patient care.
Some of the technologies and systems hospitals are using include bar coding devices, computerized physician order entry, and electronic health records.
Broader use of EHRs pushed in CHT report
The Center for Health Transformation has released a report outlining recommendations for spurring adoption of electronic health records based on the successful practices of health data exchanges known as regional health information organizations (RHIOs).
The report calls on Congress to pass "comprehensive" health IT legislation this year that includes grants or loans to create RHIOs and removes regulatory barriers to health IT progress.
The center advocates dedicating 1% of federal discretionary spending — or roughly $7 billion a year — to health IT, which it says is vital to reducing medical errors and increasing disaster preparedness.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is developing a how-to reference guide to help health care organizations in creating patient registries to track the outcomes of medical treatments, including drugs.Subscribe Now for Access
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