RPMS is piped to the clinic from the Community Health Network's data center in Barboursville, 240 miles away. VistA is fed to the clinic, too, from a VA hospital in Martinsburg, 133 miles north.
Dr. Laura Nulph, a family physician at the clinic since 2008, leads its quality-improvement committee, using RPMS to gather and perform data analysis on a host of measures, a task that would have been so labor-intensive as to have been almost impossible with paper records.
Over the past year, clinicians have increased the percentage of patients getting Pap tests from 42% to 47%; colorectal cancer tests from 42% to 48%; diabetic eye exams from 39% to 49%; and diabetic foot exams from 52% to 57%.
“We're seeing small gains, but it's better than standing still or going backwards,” Nulph says.
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