The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recently awarded a $139,788 grant to Family Health Center of Marshfield, Inc. (FHC); these funds as well as $26,596 in cost-share funds from FHC, will be directed to the Institute for Oral and Systemic Health (IOSH) via a sub-contract to expand its research and development of a Dental Quality Analytics (DQA) dashboard.
Without appropriate workflow process, service utilization and treatment outcome measures adopted as part of FHC’s dental practice and availability of health informatics tools to visualize and interact with the data, there would be significant challenges to measure the quality of care delivered and implementing any quality assurance platform. Thus, the objective of this initiative is to maintain a high standard for quality of data collected, stored and retrieved from the enterprise data warehouse (EDW), which is paramount for supporting FHC’s clinical operations, reporting requirements, ensuring quality care provision, enabling health services research and educational opportunities. This initiative will result in a scalable, re-usable and automatable dental quality metrics reporting framework, tested and validated with the large set of data from the Marshfield Clinic/FHC’s EDW.
The IOSH scientific and informatics team with development support from BIRC staff will work closely with the FHC’s Dental Quality Improvement Steering Committee and will focus on the following core activities: design and development of a production-level Dental Quality Analytics Dashboard (DQAD) to support the FHC’s DQI initiative with appropriate informatics and information technology infrastructure to mine real-time data and knowledge from the EDW to support dental clinical tasks, operations and research activities; train the FHC dental providers and administrators to integrate DQAD into their workflow; and implementation of DQAD at 10 FHC dental center operation to support the quality improvement culture – the implementation will be initially piloted in one center followed by system-wide implementation.
In addition to Dr. Acharya, Principal Investigator, the DQA project team members are:
- Dr. John O’Brien, Quality Improvement Core Lead and a Clinician Researcher at IOSH
- Harshad Hegde, Informatics Research Architect, IOSH
- Rajesh Koralkar, Research Programmer/Analyst Senior, BIRC
- Josh Theisen, Programmer/Analyst, BIRC
- Annie Steinmetz, Applications Analyst Senior, BIRC
- Shaun Halstead, Database Administrator, BIRC
- Joe Finamore, Programmer/Analyst Specialist, BIRC