How one federally qualified health center uses data to improve care

Unity Health Care focuses on more formal data governance structure

Becoming data-driven is a main goal at Unity Health Care, a federally qualified health center (FQHC) in the District of Columbia.

As a FQHC, Unity already is required to gather data reports with information such as patients’ ages, demographics and ZIP codes, Angela Duncan Diop, vice president of information systems at the health system, tells Healthcare Informatics.

With better bandwidth, the health center can now use all that data for different population health initiatives, she says. Unity has had small data governance for many years, but in the past two years has been working to turn that into a more formal governance structure, she says.

“Now we’re looking at data as a strategic resource–who are we using the data [for], how are we prioritizing it, what should our long-term partnerships be?” she said.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to big data in healthcare is making sense of all the information in a meaningful way, Drew Harris, M.D., director of health policy at Thomas Jefferson University’s School of Population Health in Philadelphia, wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

At Unity, one way employees use the data is to help patients with hypertension. The clinical workflow has been reorganized to have the nurse, instead of a physician, see the patient during a follow-up visit to get blood pressure readings and ensure that it’s recorded in the electronic medical record. Nurses also collected data on outcomes to measure the impact in decrease in blood pressure, Diop says.

She adds that, while smaller organizations sometimes feel they don’t have the resources to do research, starting small is the key. “Find those people who are interested in data, or outcomes measurement, or change management, and start where you’re at.”

Unlike Unity, some FQHCs do not use health IT to their advantage, despite a documented potential for HIT to improve the quality of care, according to a provisional study in the journal BMC Health Services Research.

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