Quality Measures Toolkit Helps Jennie Stuart Close Gaps in Care

One benefit to VHAN membership is the opportunity to make progress toward our network’s mission to transform healthcare in ways that improve health today and strengthen communities tomorrow. VHAN works hard to provide resources that help our practices improve cost and quality performance while achieving better outcomes and measurable health improvements across the state and region.

This year one VHAN member found great success implementing the VHAN Quality Measures Toolkit—ranked the No. 1 most-downloaded piece of content on the Hub. Tami Goodwin, director of Care Management at Jennie Stuart Health in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, says the toolkit helped her team build on existing processes to improve its ability to close gaps in care and improve quality performance.

Goodwin’s team has added a few extra steps when calling patients for important appointments or screenings, such as mammograms. Now the care management team sends a mailer, researches each patient’s insurance to see if they have an incentive program, adds notes in the EMR for specialists or other providers to remind patients they are due for a screening, and calls each patient regularly until they schedule an appointment.

The enhanced communication measures have helped team members improve or maintain several quality measures, including appropriate mammogram screenings and emergency department utilization.

The toolkit has helped us with almost all of our quality measures,” Goodwin says. “And aside from using the Quality Measures Toolkit, we watch the webinars on the Hub and I listen to all of the miniVHAN podcasts. All of these resources have helped so much. Every little bit of information about what somebody else is doing helps us try new things and improve our process.”