While policymakers debate whether requiring 5 percent of patients to communicate with their healthcare providers through portals is too onerous, a small primary care practice run by a 65-year-old physician is showing that patient engagement is not only possible, it’s profitable.
Grove Medical Associates in Auburn, Mass., has won a Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence for ambulatory care from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. In making the announcement late last week, HIMSS noted that the four-doctor practice has had 81 percent of its patients register for portal access.
Practice founder Dr. John Kelly estimated that about 65-70 percent of patients are actually using the portal on a regular basis. “It’s really been encouraging to see,” Kelly told MedCity News.
Grove Medical has realized a 315 percent return on investment since installing the eClinicalWorks EHR in 2005. “It was more than I had hoped for,” Kelly said. The practice was able to achieve Meaningful Use in 2011, the first year of the program, and made the jump to Stage 2 last year. (Westborough, Mass.-based eClinicalWorks said that this is the 13th time one of its customers has won a Davies in the past eight years.)
Some of the gains came from finding and then correcting the fact that the practice was undercoding many of its insurance claims simply because it lacked documentation. “If you didn’t document it, you didn’t do it in today’s world,” Kelly said.
On the clinical side, Grove Medical scored 97.4 of 100 for communication on the Massachusetts Health Quality Partners‘ Patient Experience Survey report in 2013 and achieved Level III certification as a patient-centered medical home from the National Committee for Quality Assurance in 2014. The practice joined an accountable care organization last year as well.
“As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and private payers transition to payment for value reimbursement models, small ambulatory practices often struggle to meet compliance requirements while improving care quality,” Jonathan French, director of quality and patient safety at HIMSS, said in a statement announcing the Davies Award.
“Grove Medical Associates leveraged the data generated by information technology to demonstrate to providers that adherence to EHR-enabled best practice protocols resulted in better care. GMA interfaces to access hospital data to track patient outcomes and utilizes dashboards throughout their practice to track best practice adherence. The alignment of technology, people, and process at Grove Medical Associates has resulted in improved care for their patients,” French continued.
The practice started on the journey 10 years ago after the two youngest physicians “dragged me kicking and screaming” into the digital age, Kelly, now 65, recalled. However, he has grown to appreciate the technology. “It’s been a labor of love,” Kelly said, and he credits his office staff for making it work.
Over the years, Grove Medical and eClinicalWorks built bidirectional interfaces with IT systems at Saint Vincent Hospital in nearby Worcester, Mass., to share laboratory and radiology/mammography reports. The hospital is able to inform the practice electronically when one of Grove Medical’s patients shows up in the emergency room.
Still, interoperability is elusive when referring patients to other specialists. “There has to be a smoother flow of information than exists at the present time,” Kelly said.
