[Today’s guest post is by Dr. Griffin Myers, whose innovative primary care clinic for Medicare patients, Oak Street Health, opened its doors in September 2013.]
Welcome back; this is the second in a series of guest posts I’ve been invited to write for GeriTech. As mentioned in my previous post, one nice way to think about our model of primary care for Medicare beneficiaries at Oak Street Health is using the list of recommendations put forth in the Institute of Medicine report “Best Care at Lower Cost.”
This post is about the first recommendation, which falls into what the report groups into the category of “Foundational Elements.” Ironically we’ve found these to be the hardest objectives thus far. We’re still in a bit of flux as we get settled into our new setup, but I’ll give an introduction.
“Recommendation 1: The digital infrastructure. Improve the capacity to capture clinical, care delivery process, and financial data for better care, system improvement, and the generation of new knowledge.”
This immediately brings to mind a super-EHR: one product for charting, practice management, financials, claims, population health, and clinical decision support.
But, surprise: there is no off-the-shelf product that integrates all of this for primary care, never mind primary care for seniors. At least not that we’ve found after an extensive search. There are products for each of those functions, but not a single package. And asking providers to use multiple non-integrated products isn’t a real solution. Here’s our approach.
How we chose an EHR & practice management system [Read more…] about Digital Infrastructure for Medicare Primary Care: the Oak Street Health Story