WRS Health and Major Academic Medical Center Team Up on CHEER Clinical Research

WRS Health and major academic medical center are teaming up to collaborate on the CHEER Clinical Research Network for Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery to exchange data for practice-based research improvements.

Background:

The Duke Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, working with the Duke Clinical Research Institute, is at the forefront of efforts to improve the quality of clinical research in disorders of the ear, nose, and throat. In an effort funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers at Duke created CHEER (Creating Healthcare Excellence through Education and Research), a clinical research network.

CHEER was developed to connect Research and Clinical Practice by fostering high-quality, multicenter clinical research in all disorders within Otolaryngology. The network is centered around alliances between academic institutions and community practitioners, bringing large-scale research opportunities to providers across the country.

WRS provides fully integrated, cloud-based electronic medical record and practice management solutions for medical practices, and its subsidiary ENT-Cloud specializes in Otolaryngology.

Our Objectives with CHEER:

WRS Health, and its subsidiary ENT-Cloud will be working in tandem with Duke researchers to undertake a quality improvement project through CHEER to analyze the clinical and administrative data of participating WRS Health and Otolaryngology practices in order to minimize false negatives and/or false positives and collectively provide feedback on evidence-based clinical care through thoughtful algorithms and risk adjustments to their Quality Improvement Registry as well as future research projects approved by Duke’s Institutional Review Board.

The initiative will test the feasibility of data exchange, mapping and parsing it in order to perform descriptive analysis, quality metrics and practice characterizations for participating clinical sites. The purpose of which is to provide feedback on evidence-based care and quality and potentially identify factors associated with effective healthcare services.

Methods:

We will collaboratively develop the data repository initiative CHEER with the researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute by analyzing data to help bridge the gap between empirical research and clinical Otolaryngology practices by managing and analyzing large administrative databases for statistics support to improve patient-care guidelines for the benefit of ENT providers and their patients.

• The repository will serve as a compilation of patient health data pertaining primarily, but not limited, to head and neck conditions. The patient health data will be from patients seen at ear, nose, and throat and primary care practices that subscribe to this cloud-based electronic health record. The data will serve as a registry for future research use to discover new knowledge about disease, treatments, and health care services in otolaryngology.
• WRS will provide data for approximately 30,000 patients from their cloud-based electronic heath records system to Duke at periodic intervals via a secure server. Prior to sharing this data, WRS will disseminate “opt-in” letters to their clients utilizing their electronic heath records system. WRS will ensure that data will be shared only from clinical practice sites who have agreed to “opt-in”.
• Duke will receive retrospective clinical data from 20 primary and ENT practice sites to evaluate a test data set for translation, develop a work plan for data mapping, and program automated descriptive reports. If the pilot test data set is successful and deemed valuable, then subsequent data transfers will occur at intervals decided upon at a later date by Duke and WRS Health/ENT-Cloud.
• The limited data set will then be used by designated statisticians to perform quality metrics. The results of the quality assurance analysis will be shared with WRS and clinical practice sites for quality improvement.
• It is contemplated that results of the QI/Research Plan will be jointly published.

Along with others, we will be working with David Witsell, MD, MHS, professor in the department of surgery at Duke University School of Medicine.

About WRS Health

WRS Health is the leading cloud-based provider of Health IT Platforms, Tools and Applications for over 32 medical specialties. In 2014, WRS Health was awarded the Surescripts White Coat of Quality Award for e-Prescribing Best Practices for the fourth year in a row. WRS Health seamlessly integrates all of the clinical and business functions required for healthcare providers, including: Electronic Medical Records, Revenue Cycle Management, Personal Health Records, electronic prescribing (eRx), scheduling, website creation and content management, messaging, fax, order tracking, and billing — all at an affordable price.

WRS Health is a Surescripts® Solution Provider for its web-based Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Practice Management System (PM) V5.0. WRS EHR/PM Version 5.0 is Surescripts® certified for prescription routing messaging, and has been certified as a 2014 Meaningful Use Complete EHR by InfoGard, an accredited American National Standards Institute (ANSI) ONC Authorized Certification Body (ONC‐ACB). It has been designed and built by medical professionals, who leveraged their expertise to help other healthcare providers with similar issues. More information on WRS Health can be found at www.wrshealth.com, or by calling 1-866-977-4367.

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