Nebraska Family Care Practice Gets HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award

Fremont Family Care, a small primary care practice in Fremont, Neb., has been named a 2014 HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award recipient by the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

Just prior to the implementation of their practice-wide electronic health record (EHR), Fremont lost several key physicians. Improved documentation, cost avoidance associated with improved clinical outcomes, and a strong culture of information sharing with the local hospital allowed Fremont to quickly recover on the lost patient load to demonstrate significant return on investment, according to  a case study on HIMSS’ website.

Quality improvement outcomes included lower hospitalization for pneumonia and improved HgbA1c control in Fremont's patient population, while Fremont also successfully screened and immunized patients at a much higher rate for flu, breast cancer, and colorectal cancer through the utilization of an EHR-enabled workflow that featured use of best practice clinical decision support alerts, analytics, and patient engagement, officials said.

In order to determine the outcome associated with the improved process associated with increasing pneumonia vaccination, Fremont Family Care partnered with Fremont Area Medical Center (now Fremont Health) in fiscal year 2013 to track and improve hospitalizations for pneumonia. Fremont Health began to collect data identifying patient admissions and shared admission rates specifically for Fremont Family Care patients. As result of an EHR-enabled initiative to use clinical decision support (CDS) to improve pneumonia vaccinations, Fremont observed over a 50 percent decrease in the number of their patients that were hospitalized for pneumonia.

Fremont Family Care is the first 2014 HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award recipient so far this year.