Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) across the United States turn to The Delaware Health Net (DHN) to improve overall clinical results.
The nonprofit membership organization provides support to 18 FQHCs that direct clinical health services to uninsured and underinsured patients.
“Delaware Health Net is all about organizations that want to work together to advance themselves and improve performance,” DHN Chief Executive Officer Craig Law said. The collaboration is an open forum where everybody can share, determine best practices and see how they’re doing compared to their peers.
Demonstrating strong performance for value-based care
With the industry moving from fee-for-service to value-based care, guidance from Allscripts has helped DHN provide support to health centers as they attest for incentive programs from The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Reports available through the system help DHN pinpoint problems and build protocols to start achieving higher performance.
“Using these reports, we can make sure all patients are up to date on the services they need through clinical decision support, protocols and templates,” DHN Informatics Analyst Gabby Country Schultz said.
Collectively, participants in DHN have achieved measurable clinical improvements.
Managing population health
Like many healthcare organizations looking to continually improve results, DHN is exploring ways to help members incorporate population health management strategies. These approaches include risk stratification and patient engagement. DHN added the Allscripts FollowMyHealth® patient engagement solution, built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, in April 2014 to facilitate patient access to personal health information.
“Using Clinical Decision Support (the magic triangle) makes it easy for providers to see what care gaps there are for patients and close those gaps, right from within the EHR. Quite a click saver,” Law said.
Improving the provider experience
EHR workflow optimization is one way in which organizations can help reduce clinician burden and enhance the provider experience. DHN reviews reports for each group, then will customize, train or suggest how to more efficiently and accurately document regulatory requirements inside the EHR.
“Allscripts offers a plethora of tools, from Protocols to Visit Templates, Smart Lists to Clinical Decision Support,” DHN Optimization Analyst, Cara Toomey said. “There are ways to reduce time and clicks for our providers. It is always rewarding when we can show a group an easier and faster way to document.”
Enhancing value through data
The combination of Professional EHR and Practice Management helps organizations demonstrate progress and improves their capacity for data standardization, management and analysis. With the right tools and guidance from DHN, participating centers have also achieved Level 3 Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) certification. Practice Management enables centers to build and customize reports, as well as view, revise and update billing information at any time.
DHN now assists 18 member organizations with more than 450 providers that use the solutions, with plans to expand in 2019. DHN continues to work toward increasing the percentage of members using health IT to facilitate patient access to personal health information and advancing health IT and training.
As our clients’ needs in patient engagement evolve, so do our solutions. The new mobile platform makes it easier for patients to stay connected by removing barriers that discourage interaction.
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Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Allscripts' website.