The Potential of Advanced Rooming to Improve Communication and Visit Efficiency in Federally Qualified Health Centers.

Advanced rooming is a workflow that enables non-clinician staff to take on additional responsibilities to improve quality and productivity. However, the impact is not well understood, particularly in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). In this observational study at two FQHC sites, we found that in advanced rooming more questions were asked by patients and staff and more problems were identified and addressed. Advanced rooming medical assistants spent more time with patients and huddled longer with clinicians without significant differences in the clinical portion of the visit or total visit length. Advanced rooming may be a way to enhance care, ease clinician burden, and increase efficiency.

Implementing an advanced team-based care model in a federally qualified health center (FQHC): Assessing implementation facilitators and challenges.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to assess implementation facilitators and challenges for advanced team-based care (aTBC) in a federally qualified health center (FQHC). In aTBC, care team coordinators room patients, perform vitals and agenda setting during patient intake, and remain present alongside providers during patient visits. METHODS: The authors conducted a qualitative post-hoc analysis of the aTBC implementation using data from several sources. They used content analysis to code items as facilitators or challenges and thematic analysis to group those into larger themes. Finally, they applied a priori codes from the revised consolidated framework for implementation research (CFIR) to organize the facilitators and barriers into subdomains. RESULTS: The existing evidence-base around aTBC, the FQHC's ability to pilot and adapt it, and strong implementation leads were key facilitating factors. Challenges included an external shock (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic), aTBC complexity, and uncertainty about whether success required implementation of the full model versus easier-to-integrate smaller components. CONCLUSIONS: FQHCs that wish to implement aTBC models need strong champions and internal structures for piloting, adapting, and disseminating interventions. FQHC leaders must think strategically about how to build support and demonstrate success to improve an FQHC's chances of expanding and sustaining aTBC.

Reduced Accuracy of Intake Screening Questionnaires Tied to Quality Metrics.

Clinical workflows that prioritize repetitive patient intake screening to meet performance metrics may have unintended consequences. This retrospective analysis of electronic health record data from 24 Federally Qualified Health Centers assessed effectiveness and accuracy of the 2-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2) for depression screening and Generalized Anxiety Disorder 2 (GAD-2) for anxiety screening from 2019 to 2021. Scores of over 91% of PHQ-2 and GAD-2 tests indicated low likelihood of depression or anxiety, which diverged markedly from published literature on screening outcomes. Visit-based screenings linked to performance metrics may not be delivering the intended value in a real-world setting and risk distracting clinical effort from other high value activities.

The people, process, and technology for population management in community health.

Population health expands the focus of health care from individual, in-person care to the proactive management of cohorts that can occur asynchronously from a clinical encounter. In its most successful form, the approach segments populations by defined characteristics and promotes outreach and engagement to deliver targeted interventions, even among those who have missed recent or routine care. The triple aim, supported by the Institutes for Health Care Improvement, emphasizes improving the health of populations, cost of care, and patient and care team experience and has influenced new approaches in primary care. In primary care settings such as community health centers, the goal of improving outcomes leverages technology to expand focus from point-of-care interventions to population-level approaches to deliver high-quality preventive services and chronic disease management that benefit entire families and communities. Developments in informatics have introduced technology tools for population management and underscored the need to align technology with effective processes and stakeholder engagement for success. Informed by a review of the literature and observations across multiple implementations of population health strategies in community health, in this conceptual paper, we describe the steps (process), domains of team expertise (people), and health information technology components (technology) that contribute to the success of a population health strategy. We also explore future opportunities to expand the reach and impact of population health through patient engagement, analytics, interventions to address social determinants of health, responses to emerging public health priorities, and prioritization-of-use cases by assessing community-specific needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The refugee medical exam: what you need to do.

Refugees arrive in this country with complex medical needs. Here's how best to care for these patients during the initial medical examination, and beyond.