AHRQ Issues White Paper on Health IT Best Practices in Primary Care

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has released a white paper highlighting best practices for leveraging health IT in an effort to improve primary care quality, EHR Intelligence reports.

White Paper Details

The white paper highlights several tools that can improve care quality and facilitate further adoption of health IT among primary care physicians. For the paper, AHRQ gained insights from:

• A large academic primary care facility;
• A primary care-supporting health information exchange organization;
• Clinicians from an independent primary care practice; and
• Health IT experts.

Findings

In the white paper, AHRQ noted that key health IT tools for primary care providers include:

• Electronic health record systems;
• Clinical decision support systems;
• HIE capabilities; and
• Registries.

In addition, AHRQ identified four factors that contribute to effective use of health IT, including:

• A practice culture committed to health IT;
• High-functioning health IT tools capable of tracking;
• A knowledgeable staff with health IT and quality improvement experience; and
• Workflows and processes that incorporate health IT.

The white paper also included case studies to demonstrate ways providers can incorporate health IT tools into their practices (Gruessner, EHR Intelligence, 3/31).