Merry Medisolving: Featuring Laurie Packard

Featuring: Laurie Packard from Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital

Name: Laurie Packard
Job Title: Director of Quality Resources
Hospital: Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital
Would you rather be one of Santa’s elves or one of his reindeer:

For over a year, Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital struggled to get their Electronic measures in a file that was able to be submitted to CMS. When they upgraded to the MEDITECH 6.1 platform things went from bad to worse. It became clear they needed a new solution.

Within a few months of switching to Medisolv, Laurie Packard, Director of Quality Resources at Signature Hospital, was able to easily see the hospital’s Electronic measure results and submit their eCQMs to CMS well before the 2018 deadline.

Before we dive in can you tell me a little bit about your hospital?

Signature Healthcare is a 248-bed, acute care hospital located in Brockton, Massachusetts just outside of Boston.

Tell me about your job. How you got to this position and what you do on a day to day basis.

I’ve been at the hospital since 1998. I started out as an RN, moved to the ED for several years, and then, in 2006, transitioned over to the Quality department where I started working on the Core measures. I focused mostly on inpatient chart abstraction.

My current job title is Director of Quality Resources. I oversee three Quality Specialists, our Data Analyst and the Regulatory Compliance employees who are tasked with keeping us survey ready for The Joint Commission accreditation. 

I make sure we are compliant with our Core measure abstraction and our electronic submissions to the government. 

I also manage a lot of dashboards. I’ll look at the data from our abstracted and electronic measure results and review it with the respective chiefs; the OB chief, the ED chief or the Medicine chief. I then take that information and share it with the Quality committees and eventually it moves up to the board of trustees. This way everyone knows what we need to work on and in what areas we are doing well.

You’ve only recently started using ENCOR for your Electronic measure capture, right? What did you use before you had ENCOR?

We were using another vendor to try and build a file to gather our electronic data. It wasn’t easy and we were never able to work it through.

The problem really came after we upgraded to the MEDITECH 6.1 platform. It was much different than we were used to. Initially, we had to outsource the rebuilding of our xml files for our inpatient, outpatient and our psyche data. And getting data from our Electronic measures was very challenging.

It was a very long process. We had weekly calls. We had weekly updates. We ended up having to bring in a consultant and still we weren’t able to get the information we needed for our Electronic measures.

At this point, we started to look for an alternative. We were already using Medisolv for our Meaningful Use Objective measures and IT was happy with them. Because ENCOR was installed on our system it was already capturing the data we needed without going through a whole new file build and using all of those resources that we really didn’t have. So, we decided to use Medisolv’s ENCOR product just this past summer.

Can you tell me a little bit about the onboarding/implementation process?

From my perspective, it was nothing. It was there. It was just like a miracle!

In no time at all we were able to bring up the software, learn how to review the aggregate data and drill down to the patient-level data.

Immediately we were able to see that our Electronic measure results weren’t as good as they were on the chart-abstracted side. We immediately started drilling down deeper to the patient level to figure out why we weren’t capturing certain things. We fixed the problems and the numbers looked much better right away. 

Although, we still have work to do. We’re providing the care, we just need to capture that care in the right spot so our Electronic measures match our quality of care.

What is it like now to monitor your eCQMs using ENCOR?

It’s not a difficult system to navigate. I will meet up with the IT department and together we go into a population and drill down on those patients. If there are some patients that I feel should be in the numerator and they’re not then we use ENCOR to figure out the problem. Darrel Whitmill, our Medisolv clinical consultant, helps us. We get on a phone call with Darrel and drill down to sort out what is missing for that patient.

I know the clinical end very well and our IT person knows the technical end, but Darrel is our bridge between the two different perspectives. It’s been very helpful.

If CMS doesn't have any threshold requirements for the Electronic measures why bother to improve your results?

Even though we know CMS is not worried about measure performance yet, we believe they will be in the future. They will probably publicly report our results in the future as well. We know from experience this process can take a long time to figure out. We want to work this out now so that it accurately reflects the quality of care at our organization when they are out there for the public to see. And it’s good we worked on it now given how long it took us to figure out that we needed another solution.

Anything else you'd like to add about the product or Medisolv before we go?

I really think, for myself, it’s been a lifesaver. I was so stressed about how we were ever going to get that other file built and it just wasn’t happening. Then when they installed ENCOR for our Electronic measures and instantly there were numbers … I’m telling you it was like a miracle. I’m not sure what we’d be doing now. I mean it’s December now and I think we still wouldn’t have that file built. Meanwhile, with Medisolv, we’ve already submitted our eCQM data for our 2017 reporting requirement that’s not technically due until February. It’s been a great change.