Question

1. The Valley Medical Clinic provides both preventive health and direct health care services to patients who live within an 80-mile distance in the surrounding rural areas, although it has placed more emphasis on curative rather than preventive services. Recently, the management of the clinic decided to increase emphasis on the delivery of preventive services to patients, offering a dedicated wellness clinic. The current clinic uses a basic electronic health record (EHR), it does not use technology for preventive care assessment, delivery of preventive services, preventive care reminders, or preventive care auditing. The management has decided to invest several million dollars in acquiring new health information technology to improve preventive care services.

1. Explain two factors that might have led the Valley Medical Clinic to focus on the delivery of preventive services rather than curative services. (2 points)
2. Explain how the use of the following computerized applications could help the clinic to lower the costs of preventive care assessment while improving its efficiency and effectiveness:
   1. Comprehensive EHR (2 points)
   2. Interactive voice response systems (2 points)
   3. Patient registry (2 points)
3. How might a reminder system, either stand-alone or integrated into the EHR, be used to improve their preventive care quality measures? (2 points)
4. Explain two benefits and two limitations that the clinic might face in using mHealth tools to facilitate preventive health services. (4 points)

Answer 1

a. The two factors that might have led the Valley Medical Clinic to focus on the delivery of preventive services are

• Prevention is better than cure. So the Preventive services help to identify the risk assessment and socio-behavioral data of the population.
• People more focused on the well-being of health rather than treating diseases.

b.

i. Comprehensive EHR: It helps to provide the right information to the patient and to provide effective services to the patients. Computerized information also provides knowledge, skills on preventive health services and thereby improve their efficiency.

ii. Interactive voice response system: It recommended preventive health measures through reminders, audio recordings. It provides preventive services through telephonic interviews to the needed population.

iii. Patient registry: In addition, text messages and mobile application helps to synchronize the data and helps to change the behavior of the patient. Allocation of data based on their needs.

C. The stand-alone system improves the EHR system by measuring the quality of preventive services such as immunized persons, screening rates, medication availability and usage, and the effectiveness of counseling services. It synchronizes the data for quality measures.

d. Two benefits:

• mHealth empowers the clinicians to concentrate more on preventive services.
• It creates incentive programs to focus more on positive health outcomes.

Two limitations:

• Technical challenges limit the activity of Preventive EHR services.
• EHR does not support the non-clinical data.