Atif Zafar, MD. Indiana University, Regenstrief Institute for Healthcare, Indianapolis, IN. The AHRQ NRC Web Development Team*. Agency for Healthcare ...
The AHRQ National Resource Center for Health Information Technology (Health IT) Public Web Resource Atif Zafar, MD Indiana University, Regenstrief Institute for Healthcare, Indianapolis, IN The AHRQ NRC Web Development Team* Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Gaithersburg, Maryland Abstract The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has invested $166 million in projects designed to test the effectiveness of health information technologies (health IT) as they relate to cost, quality and patient safety indicators. These projects embrace the breadth of health IT solutions and involve participants from across the United States. In order to systematically deliver the lessons learned from these projects to a diverse national audience and to assist those in the early stages of health IT deployment, AHRQ has created a national website which highlights the successes and challenges faced by its grantees and aggregates a compendium of useful and peer-reviewed health IT content. Introduction The task of implementing health IT is far from trivial. AHRQ health IT grantees are generating new insights about implementation best practices related to cost, quality and safety indicators. The new AHRQ health IT website aggregates these lessons learned and hosts other relevant content including papers, briefs, presentations, slide sets, speeches, toolkits, guides and summaries from a variety of professional organizations and experts, all in one place. This content is indexed and searchable and has been vetted by internal experts as being of high quality. Methods Several professional organizations, including AMIA, AHIMA, HIMSS, AAFP, and the eHealth Initiative, contributed content for the website. We crawled the websites of these organizations and labeled the content using an internally-developed taxonomy. We also created summary documents in several key topic areas related to health IT that define terminology, explain controversies, expose new research findings and demonstrate how grantees are addressing topic areas. We uploaded presentations created by our panel of experts for national teleconference series on health IT sponsored by the agency. A separate evaluation group worked on creating a blueprint for doing evaluation activities and created a toolkit for evaluation. Finally, we created information pages
about our grantees with contact information to promote the development of communities of practice. Results Our partners contributed 5735 high quality documents that we indexed. We created 20 different summary pages for key topics including CPOE/CDS, Standards, EMR/EHR, HIE and telemedicine. We also created pages for emerging lessons from the field from our grantees. A 37-page evaluation toolkit shows how to do a robust evaluation exercise related to 7 indicator types. We built a process for revising and updating content on a timely basis and for ensuring its high quality, timeliness and relevance. Announced by AHRQ leadership at HIMSS 2006, the website received 3811 visits in its first week from 2912 unique visitors. During that same week, there were 41349 page hits and the evaluation toolkit was downloaded 522 times. There were 1232 visits to the knowledge library, 1434 visits to the list of AHRQ funded projects, and 529 visits to some of the key topic pages. Other areas of interest included the page on funding opportunities (554 visits) and a list of upcoming events (685 visits). Conclusion Our web site contains quality vetted content, is efficiently searchable and is available freely to you. We encourage feedback and hope that it serves your needs as you embark on making health IT successful in your practice or region. AHRQ NRC Website URL http://healthit.ahrq.gov Acknowledgements * The NRC Web Resource Team consists of more than 20 members from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), Indiana University/Regenstrief, Partners Healthcare and the Center for Information Technology Leadership, Vanderbilt Center for Better Health, the eHealth Initiative, Burness Communications and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
AMIA 2006 Symposium Proceedings Page - 1154
