RESEARCH
Research
The Alliance remains committed to becoming a leader in community-driven research that directly benefits the populations we serve. We enjoy productive, ongoing relationships with academic partners, nursing centers, and other safety net community organizations. Given the robust EHR system and customized data warehouse, the Alliance is well poised to carry out large, meaningful projects across its national EHRS User Community. Research areas of interest include:
• Quality measurement and improvement research
• Health literacy
• Cost effectiveness
• Comparative effectiveness
• Medical device integration
• Telemedicine
• Health information exchange
• Health Disparities
Practice Based-Research Network
In 2008, the Alliance registered as a Practice-Based Research Network (PBRN) with both the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Inventory and Evaluation of Clinical Research Networks. As a registered PBRN, the Alliance has four main objectives:
• To leverage capabilities of a functional centralized EHRS and data warehouse for decision support and population level reporting to facilitate clinical/translational research.
• To focus on areas of research that are most critical to the vulnerable populations served by community health centers, including: disparities, quality enhancement, and information technology.
• To provide an infrastructure to promote community based clinician and community resident participation in research.
• To liaison with external research partners (including academic medical centers, community organizations, industry) to ensure that patients served by CHCs are represented in, and benefit from, larger research efforts.
The Alliance End User Community of more than 20 individual safety net Health Centers comprises the PBRN. Individual Centers will have the option to participate in any number of research activities underway across the network.
Research Partners
Click to view research partners
Research Webinars
Research that Matters - Use your clinical, real-world experience to identify questions/issues/problems to study. Give examples of actual research projects that addressed important questions relevant to clinical practice.
Click here to view the on-demand webinar: "Research that Matters"
Shaping the Initial Idea Into a Research Question - Reviewing the literature to assess what is known. Identifying gaps in the literature; Quality improvement and quality improvement research; Putting it all together: creating a draft aims page.
Click here to view the on-demand webinar: "Shaping the Initial Idea into a Research Question"
Past Research Projects
EQUIP (2003-2007): Enhancing Quality in Patient Care (EQUIP) was a 3-year AHRQ-funded project to realize greater potential of an EHR to capture, monitor and report useful data to drive improvements in safety and quality of care in federally funded community health centers (CHCs). Key partners on this project included: American Medical Association, Health Information Management Systems Society, GE Healthcare Clinical Data Services, and First Consulting Group. Project highlights include:
1. Implementation of a commercial EHR in a network of CHCs in a manner that ensures consistency of health information across all clinicians, sites and populations;
2. Development of a customized data warehouse to monitor, aggregate, and report data for national quality measures (Diabetes, Preventive Care and Screening, and Coronary Artery Disease developed by the AMA’s Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement and HRSA)
3. Creation of clinical decision support, centered on evidence-based guidelines and national performance measures to enhance quality at the point of care.
ADVANCE (2005-2007): The ADVANCE Project was a partnership among the Health Research and Educational Trust, American Medical Association (AMA), and the Alliance, led by PI Dr. Romana Hasnain-Wynia. The objective of the project was to utilize the EHR in place at all four Alliance Health Centers to systematically collect patient demographic data, including race, ethnicity, and primary language. These demographic data were then used to stratify national performance measures for diabetes, preventive care and screening, and asthma, developed by the AMA’s Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement, to identify disparities in performance and inform targeted quality improvement efforts. Co-funding for this project was provided by the Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Publications
1. Miller RH, West CE. The Value of Electronic Health Records in Community Health Centers: Policy Implications. Health Affairs. 2007;26(1):206-214.
2. Zheng K, McGrath D, Hamilton A, Tanner C, White M, Pohl, JM. Assessing organizational readiness for adopting electronic health record systems: A case study in ambulatory practices. Journal of Decision Systems. 2009;18(1):117--40.