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Click HERE for instructions for how to participate.
The HITECH Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act place new emphasis on the widespread and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). This is an important advance, with one significant exception: Currently EHRs fail to capture data reflecting crucial health behaviors and psychosocial issues. Such patient-reported variables are both health outcomes themselves, and major determinants of other health outcomes. Capturing a standardized set of patient-reported variables in the EHR would lead to unprecedented data harmonization and opportunities to improve health care and health research.
Several institutes from the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with the Society of Behavioral Medicine are organizing an effort to evaluate and recommend actionable, patient-reported measures of health behaviors and psychosocial factors for use in primary care electronic health records (EHRs). In order to facilitate broad participation in the development of standard measures we are using a three-phase process of consensus building.
The first phase involved convening a panel of subject matter experts who have suggested one or more reliable, practical measures in each subject domain that would be appropriate to utilize in adult primary care and public health settings to be reported in EHRs (see below for list of constructs being assessed and criteria used by the experts).
For the second phase of this project, we are soliciting input from a broad range of stakeholders (researchers, providers, policy makers, etc.) through GEM. In order to participate in this process please read the summary statements provided by the expert working groups and provide your comments and ratings and, if you would like, suggest alternative measures. Click HERE for instructions for how to participate. Comments will be accepted through April 4, 2011.
The third phase will be a workshop/town hall meeting on May 2, 2011 at the NIH, bringing together scientists, practitioners, policy makers, and patient/consumer representatives to review the results of this campaign and make recommendations on standard consensus measures for behavioral health and health behavior screening in primary care and public health settings. We encourage everyone to participate. Information about this meeting will be available soon and will be sent to all registered users of GEM as well as other participating organizations. Immediately following this workshop there will be a closed session meeting of key stakeholders to make final recommendations based on feedback obtained from GEM and the open meeting. Workshop participants will receive a summary of the meeting as well as information on final recommendations. Subsequent to the meeting, organizers and key stakeholders will discuss strategies to build support and implement plans to advance the adoption and incorporation of a core set of patient-reported behavioral and psychosocial measures in adult primary care and public health EHRs.
Click HERE to register for the May 2 meeting.
Click HERE for a list of Health Policy Committee Members.
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