CIS Health Maintenance Tool

Thanks for finding me here. I am starting this blog to provide a forum for sharing ideas and ideals about the electronic medical record and to help facilitate the successful adoption of CIS throughout the Baystate Medical Practices. I see this blog as one of many tools needed for peer-to-peer exchange for the sharing of ideas, critiques and criticisms of the current state of the EMR and its hoped-for future state.

The first topic that I'd like to examine is the Health Maintenance tool. As many of you know, this has been online for over a year and was developed as a means of accounting for both general and disease-specific patient care measures. While it has a number of imperfect elements, I know it has been widely adopted based on internal reporting and on the comments I receive via email. The most recent issue is the response to the new expectation for the Zostavax, or shingles vaccine, for all patients 60 years and older.

Let's begin this conversation with a review of the various guidelines that have been referred to in the development of the current state. Feel free to compare and contrast and leave your comments here, especially as they pertain to some of the more questionable elements I included during the initial build, e.g. PSA/DRE, clinical breast exam.

Collected Guidelines from AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
Prostate Cancer Screening ACS
Breast Cancer Screening ACS
MHQP Guidelines


Let's use this set of links as a starting point for our conversation. If you are interested, I can share with you some of the technical details involved in the build of the HM tool as well as a preview of the tool as it will exist in a year from now.

I'd also welcome thoughts on the best ways to communicate with the BMP community. While I know that email is usual method for institution-based communication, the blogosphere may add to the exchange by adding a new dimension of web appeal.