Indian Health Service receives national award

The Indian Health Service (IHS) Clinical Reporting System (CRS) has been selected by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) as a recipient of the National Public Health Davies Award.

The IHS received this award for the development of an application designed for national reporting as well as local and area tracking of clinical performance indicators.

The HIMSS is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health.

The Davies Award program was originally created in 1995 to honor Dr. Nicholas Davies, a physician committed to the ideal of improving patient care through better health information management.

Dr. Davies was a member of the Institute of Medicine Patient Record Study Committee.

The IHS is the principal federal agency responsible for providing preventive, curative and community health care to approximately 1.8 million of the nation's 3.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives.

"The IHS is honored to receive this national award as one of the recognized leaders in information technology and management systems," stated Dr. Charles W. Grim, IHS Director. "We are proud of our Information Technology staff members who are making this effort successful."

The IHS CRS is a Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) application designed for national reporting as well as local and area tracking of clinical performance indicators, such as assessment, care, and control of diabetes; dental care; immunization; treatment of cardiovascular disease; etc.

The CRS is intended to eliminate the need for manual chart audits for evaluating and reporting clinical indicators for local performance improvement initiatives and for national agency reporting to Congress as required by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)

The GPRA requires federal agencies to demonstrate that they are using their funding effectively toward meeting their mission and goals, and this system describes how the IHS proposes to accomplish its goals within its annual budget.

The CRS is updated at least annually to reflect changes in clinical guidelines for existing measures as well as adding new measures to reflect new healthcare priorities.

The CRS produces reports on demand from local RPMS databases for one or more of 41 clinical topics, comprised of over 250 individual indicators.

Reports also compare the site's performance numbers in the current report year to the previous year and to a user-defined baseline year. Users can also request patient lists for each of the measures, displaying patients who do and do not meet the indicator criteria.

Local health facilities can run reports for individual or all indicators as often as needed and can also use the CRS to transmit national-level data to their area for quarterly reporting.

The area office can use CRS to produce an aggregated area report for national-level data.