News
News release
DBMI Researcher Receives $350,000 Grant to Study the Availability and Use of Health Information Technology in Nursing Homes
November 26, 2007
Steven M. Handler, MD, MS, CMD, is the co-principal investigator on a $350,000 grant awarded by The Commonwealth Fund to study the availability and use of heath information technology (HIT) in nursing homes.
The goals of this 18-month study are to:
- Use the nominal group technique to identify a list of clinical care processes that top nursing home management and clinicians believe can benefit from health information technology (HIT);
- Conduct a market scan of HIT software for nursing homes; and
- Conduct a survey of nursing home administrators, directors of nursing, physicians, consultant pharmacists, and advance practice nurses who work in nursing homes to estimate the stage of HIT adoption for each clinical care process.
“Short term benefits of this study,” according to Handler, “are to provide a reliable estimate of the types of heath information technology that are available and the degree to which they are being used in nursing homes. This is not well defined in the literature and represents an important first step to understanding the current state of heath information technology in nursing homes.”
The long-term benefits will help describe the opportunities where HIT can improve clinical care processes in the nursing home. Handler’s project emphasizes the need to first define the current set of problems and then provide a set of solutions to match those needs.
“This is contrary to the way that some heath information technology is developed,” says Handler. “Quite frequently, a HIT ‘solution’ is developed in advance of knowing what the problems are.”
Handler is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, and has a secondary faculty appointment at the Department of Biomedical Informatics (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine). Handler is also a doctoral student in the Pittsburgh Biomedical Informatics Training Program, and is the lead author of the recent paper “Identifying Modifiable Barriers to Medication Error Reporting in the Nursing Home Setting” (Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, November 2007).
The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation supporting independent research on health and social issues. To read or download publications, visit the Web site at http://www.cmwf.org.
For additional information, please contact:
Joseph Cummings
Communications Manager, Department of Biomedical Informatics
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
412-647-7156
jxc3@pitt.edu
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