Health IT Underused in Care Coordination

The capabilities of health information technology tools aren’t always aligned with physician priorities, research finds. And the care coordination activities that matter most to clinicians aren’t ones that are best supported by health IT.

Using health IT to support care coordination is inconsistent in primary care practices, especially when it comes to the care coordination activities that matter most to clinicians, according to new research in theAnnals of Family Medicine.

“The activities that the clinicians were most interested in were not ones that were necessarily most supported by health IT,” says lead author Suzanne Morton, MPH, MBA, senior healthcare analyst for the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

In addition, the research found that the care-coordination activities that practices had most commonly implemented were not the ones with the greatest degree of health IT support.

The researchers surveyed primary care practices (both physician-owned and hospital/health system–affiliated) that achieved patient-centered medical home recognition and participated in the Meaningful Use program, as well as community health clinics with patient-centered medical home recognition.

They asked questions about six proposed care coordination objectives for stage 3 Meaningful Use:

• Having a clinical summary for patients that’s pertinent to the office visit, not just an abstract from the medical record
• Using computerized provider order entry for referrals/transition of care orders
• Providing a summary of care record for each site transition or referral when transition or referral occurs with available information
• Ensuring that the provider receiving a referral acknowledges receipt of external information and provides referral results to the requesting provider
• Getting electronic notification of a significant healthcare event in a timely manner to key members of the patient’s care team, including arrival at an emergency department, admission to a hospital, discharge from an emergency department or hospital, or death
• Generating lists of patients for multiple specific conditions and present near real-time patient-oriented dashboards

“We found moderate use of health IT for care coordination objectives… we were a little surprised that it was not higher than when it was,” Morton says. “We also found that it varied depending on the type of activity that was being asked about.”

And high health IT use and the perceived importance of certain activities didn’t match up.

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