Incubator Program and North Carolina Division of Public Health collaboration

The Incubator Program and the North Carolina Division of Public Health (NCDPH) have collaborated on two projects in the past year in order to share content expertise and resources to improve the public's health: (1) aligning and streamlining quality related efforts for NC Public Health and (2) facilitating the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) by local health departments.

1. The overall goal of the aligning and streamlining project is to redesign, integrate, and align our quality related activities in NC Public Health (including agreement addenda, consolidated agreements and related program monitoring; accreditation; CHA and SOTCH; and quality improvement activities) in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these efforts. The focus is on activities by Partnership Directors of Nursing and QI/QA Coordinators and their staff, DPH consultants (including SOTCH and CHA), the NC Accreditation Program (NC IPH), and the NC Center for Public Health Quality. The aligning and streamlining steering committee, whose members are from the Northeastern and Northwestern Partnerships, DPH, NCCPHQ and NCIPH, meets monthly via conference call. To date progress has been made toward developing a measurement plan as well as conducting a crosswalk exercise of program audits to determine redundancy between various monitoring activities and the accreditation process.
2. The thrust of the adoption of electronic health records (EHR), on the part of local health directors, is to leverage these tools to improve the quality of care and reduce clinic costs. To encourage adoption of EHRs, the Federal government has allocated some stimulus funds to provide "meaningful use" incentives. However, to qualify for these funds, providers must satisfy a number of complex criteria. In addition, to applying for and demonstrating compliance providers at local health departments are required to document compliance; such documentation is a time-consuming and complex exercise. With this in mind members of the Incubator Steering Committee designated the development of a "funding model" as a priority incubator project. The "funding model" project would: 1) review language of the final rule for "meaningful use" criteria, 2) develop "meaningful use" notes that pertain specifically to public health providers, 3) identify the information that public health departments must collect to make document compliance, and 4) create a spreadsheet that will enable local health departments to calculate what the incentives would be for their providers. The NCIPH has been charged to execute the funding model project. As of the end of February 2011, items 1 -3 have been completed, and item 4 is underway.

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