OAKLAND, CA – The Agency for Healthcare Research Quality has awarded $600,000 to Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research to continue its heart disease prevention and management study.
Electronic medical records will play a major role in the two-year study’s examination of care patterns for heart disease prevention and their related outcomes and costs, said Thomas Vogt, MD, senior investigator at the Center in Honolulu and principal investigator for the study.
By establishing a standard process for electronically monitoring variations in physician and patient practices using EMRs, the study will enable Vogt and his team to learn what isn’t working well and is more costly and look for practices that provide the best outcomes for the lowest cost.
“The greatest threat to our healthcare system is that it is so costly and unsustainable. This is one way to address that issue,” Vogt said.
The study will deploy rich, well-structured data from Kaiser Permanente’s well-established EMR system. “This study will validate a new approach to measure quality, moving us closer to connect interventions with outcomes,” said Jon White, MD, health IT director at AHRQ.
Whereas clinical trials are self-selective, expensive and time-consuming, the EMR approach will simulate clinical trials but look at a total population.
Kaiser Permanente’s EMR system is the second largest in the United States, behind only that used by the Department of Veterans Administration. The study will follow heart disease prevention and management of 175,000 adults in Kaiser Permanente’s Hawaii region.
“EMRs help us better understand how people adhere to behavioral changes and therapies,” said Ross DeVol, director of health economics and regional economics at the Milken Institute and principal author of the report An Unhealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease.
While EMRs are an important component to improving healthcare outcomes, a systematic approach is required, with all stakeholders aligning themselves around quality, said DeVol.
Insurers have to play a major role in making sure that more prevention elements are covered out of first dollars and understand that prevention costs less than intervention.