Cincinnati Beacon Community Program highlights challenges and opportunities on the path to care transformation.

The Cincinnati, Ohio, metropolitan area was one of seventeen US communities to participate in the federal Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program to demonstrate how health information technology (IT) could be used to improve health care. Given $13.7 million to spend in thirty-one months, the Cincinnati project involved hundreds of physicians, eighty-seven primary care practices, eighteen major hospital partners, and seven federally qualified health centers and community health centers. The thrust of the program was to build a shared health IT infrastructure to support quality improvement through data exchange, registries, and alerts that notified primary care practices when a patient visited an emergency department or was admitted to a hospital. A special focus of this program was on applying these tools to adult patients with diabetes and pediatric patients with asthma. Despite some setbacks and delays, the basic technology infrastructure was built, the alert system was implemented, nineteen practices focusing on diabetes improvement were recognized as patient-centered medical homes, and many participants agreed that the program had helped transform care. However, the experience also demonstrated that the ability to transfer data was limited in electronic health record systems; that considerable effort was required to adapt technology to support quality improvement; and that the ambitious agenda required more time for planning, training, and implementation than originally thought.

Using improvement science to increase accuracy and reliability of gestational age documentation.

Our aim was to improve the reliability of recording gestational age (GA) in the mother's obstetric record, as this record is used for clinical management, research databases, and eventual transmission to the Ohio Department of Health birth certificates. We performed a prospective cohort study, including all hospital births. We began quality improvement interventions in October 2009. Improvement test cycles were targeted to four working groups, including nursing staff, community obstetric providers, and the process itself. Test cycle results were evaluated to determine which successful interventions could spread further. Rates of process outcome measurements were compared by statistical process control and univariate analysis pre- and postintervention. During the preintervention period, the median daily GA reliability was 25%. To date, over 30 small sample size tests of change have been completed. Of 8795 births studied, significant improvement in GA accuracy/completeness was detected (median postintervention = 78%, p < 0.01). Increased communication of and completion of the prenatal record, in addition to GA recording in high-risk groups, such as premature infants, were also achieved (all p < 0.01). GA reliability can be increased using standardized improvement science methods. Better communication of GA will enable better clinical decisions and foster population-based perinatal research.