Hello, and welcome to the Collaboration on Improving the Efficiency of Data Abstraction. My name is Abigail Whitbecker, and I am an Improvement Specialist with UPMC Hanover. Also presenting will be Aliyah Reichert, who is a Structural Heart Nurse Practitioner out of Riverside Methodist Hospital. Rounding off the presentation will be Dr. Andrew Shin, who is the Executive Medical Director for Innovations and Clinical Effectiveness, and the Medical Director for the Systems Utilization Research for Stanford Clinical, out of Stanford University Medical Center. Each presenter will be sharing their unique experience with data abstraction. The objectives for this presentation include identifying the benefits of using a software vendor versus no software solutions available to improve the efficiency of data abstraction and reduce the data burden. Additionally, we'll be to discuss the implementation of shared best practices in creating efficiencies. We'll start the presentation by looking at UPMC Hanover's experience. UPMC Hanover is a full-service acute care hospital with 93 licensed beds, and so we are on the smaller side. We treat over 800 cardiac patients per year, and our numbers continue to grow ever since 2014, when we initiated our STEMI program. At the time of the STEMI program, we were still an independent hospital and had not yet partnered with UPMC. This means that we had less resources and less access to funding for things such as abstraction. As I just mentioned, the STEMI program was initiated in 2014. Along with that became the need for data abstraction. As a small hospital without open-heart backup, we had a number of concerns, first being the new STEMI program in general. We wanted to ensure that we were entering the appropriate data to the NCDR and meeting both their needs and Corazon's needs, and we wanted really someone to be able to guide us through that process. More, we weren't sure about recruitment and retention and training costs. Were we going to be able to hire someone into our small rural market? Were they going to have experience? If they didn't have experience, how much were our training costs going to be? And how were we going to retain them and not have turnover and have to continue that cycle once again in our small market? We also wanted to be able to ensure the integrity of the abstractors that we were employing. Were they going to be doing the right thing every time? Were they going to have standards? Were they going to be accountable for the information that they put forward? And were they going to provide a true reflection of our program into the registries, no matter what that looked like? And finally, we weren't sure whether we should split our roles in quality or whether we should add additional full-time employees. In quality, we'd like to keep our personnel focused on process improvement and driving change based on quality standards and outcomes, but was it going to be more economical for us to actually split that role and have them do that half the time and have them abstract the other half the time to kind of help shore up that retention aspect? We weren't really sure that we wanted to separate that out. So what is a small hospital with that many concerns to do? Well, UPMC Hanover's solution was to outsource with Q-Centrics. We felt that they were able to provide us the expertise and understanding of the registry requirements that we were looking for to handle our STEMIs, and we also took their expertise and added additional registries to help grow our program. It also effectively eliminated the need for training any in-house staff and eliminated the cost of recruitment, benefits, and retention for years to come as our program continues to grow, as we won't have to worry about trying to hire future abstractors. Additionally, we felt that Q-Centrics was an established company with quality values, so we didn't have to worry ourselves over the integrity of data that was being entered, that we were sure that the data was always going to be true and honest, and it was always going to be able to be found in our EMR in case of an audit. And finally, it allowed our improvement specialists and our service line stakeholders to focus on the program management and improvement and not have to split their time with abstraction and ensure that the program was moving forward and that things were constantly being improved wherever possible. Over the years, UPMC Hanover has learned a few lessons by continuing to outsource our data with Q-Centrics. First, it is obvious that Q-Centrics remains cost-effective. We don't have to pay for individual abstractors in-house, and we don't have to pay for their benefits. We are only charged for the work that Q-Centrics performs for us on their chart reviews. This is a great added benefit. Additionally, we continue to have quick case turnaround and submission. This allows us to have a real-time feel of our data and compare it with outcomes in the NCDR. Additionally, this is extremely helpful for any process improvement that we do as we can make minute changes and see what feels like live time sometimes because of how fast they get the data into the NCDR, and I can pull my graphs and I can pull my statistics and know exactly where we sit and how things are being affected. Also, we do submit to Get With The Guidelines CAD, but we have so few charts that we actually do handle that abstraction in-house, and comparatively, having Q-Centrics handle our data is much improved as we don't have to wait for the lag time of the charts to come back, be submitted, and then wait for the abstraction to be able to be done on the in-house side. More, Q-Centrics has continued to provide the guidance and support with registries and especially with registry changes over the years, particularly looking at PVI as it merges into VQI with SVS. As a small program, we had lots of questions and concerns about where that's going to lead us and how are we going to abstract for them. How is Q-Centrics going to be able to do that? And they had all the answers for us. They were able to support us and know that they're going to be able to abstract again for us. They've been helping to guide us through the process and actually had some knowledge related to the abstraction that occurs with VQI, which was able to help us better plan for our program for 2021 and additional module options that we may want to pursue to, again, help direct our program and grow it in the community. And finally, we know that the data that goes into the NCDR is standardized and truly comparable to not only nationally, but within our hospital system. Q-Centrics is a big part of the UPMC abstractors, and so we know that our data that is being submitted and compared into the NCDR has been abstracted the same way and with the same integrity as the other hospitals within our system. So we know that we're truly getting a good look at how our hospitals perform compared to other UPMC hospitals, which is just an added benefit. Looking futuristically, we definitely expect a long-term relationship with Q-Centrics. We are currently undergoing some heart and vascular restructuring, and we expect that Q-Centrics will remain to be a pivotal part of the abstraction moving forward, and we look forward to that continued relationship. This concludes the first part of the presentation, where we looked at a small hospital's experience with outsourcing their data abstraction to Q-Centrics. I hope it was informative. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments. Again, my name is Abigail Whitbecker, and I am the Improvement Specialist here at UPMC Hanover. Below, you can see my email and my LinkedIn. Thank you.

data abstraction

UPMC Hanover

Q-Centrics

registry changes

outsourcing