Content area
Full Text
AHRQ'S CAROLYN CLANCY EXAMINES THE CURRENT QUALITY LANDSCAPE
Late last year, Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) spoke with HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland regarding her perspectives on current developments in healthcare, and her agency's involvement in pursuing innovation and change. Dr. Clancy will be the closing keynote speaker at the Healthcare Informatics Executive Summit, to be held May 11-13, in San Francisco. Below are excerpts from Dr. Clancy's interview with Hagland.
Healthcare Informatics: What is your perspective on where healthcare is right now in terms of the ability to leverage information technology strategically to improve care delivery, quality, patient safety, and efficiency?
Carolyn Clancy, M.D.: There are so many opportunities right now, and we're making progress. I'm thinking in particular about all the opportunities from the work that really began in 2004, and obviously was built on work done previously at AHRQ and the National Library of Medicine- work using health IT in chnical care.
For example, one area of opportunity includes learning in a systematic way from the off-label use of medications. About 20 percent of off-label prescribing is legal and often very appropriate, yet we don't learn a thing from it today. And another area- and Peter Pronovost [intensive care specialist and healthcare innovation leader Peter J. Pronovost, M.D., whose work with intensive care checklist protocols has become widely known] refers to this as 'feed-forward'- and that is, getting information way upstream in the care delivery process. So, imagine that a new breakthrough treatment is identified, and is applied to a particular patient and doesn't yield the results expected. In real life today, if that signal gets back to researchers doing the basic research work, it's only very weakly communicated; and really, you'd like to get that signal to the researchers much earlier. So that area of potential innovation includes using evidence in clinical care, and changing the metaphor to one from hunting to farming- growing information, and learning as a byproduct, and taking advantage of the data generated every day from taking care of patients.
HCI: Regarding the data that's essentially discarded now, what could it do for clinicians?
Clancy: It could help us learn from exceptions. Sometimes, for example, a...