Appeared in the March 10, 2004 - Volume 14, No. 5 issue of Advance Magazine for Health Information Professionals

The ATHENS Project: Advancing Technology and Healthcare Education Now at St. Scholastica

Shirley Eichenwald Maki, MBA, RHIA, CPHIMS, FAHIMA

The health care industry is now seriously being driven toward employing sophisticated clinical software applications, including the electronic health record (EHR), as tools to support both the work processes and decision-making associated with clinical practices. This imperative has emerged out of the many Institute of Medicine (IOM) Reports published over the past few years, all focused on issues and recommendations related to improving patient safety, the quality of patient care and increasing the efficiency of patient care processes. For health care's academic world specifically, IOM's Crossing The Quality Chasm report recommended that strategies be developed for restructuring clinical education and, subsequently, their Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality report (2003) presented this "overarching vision for programs and institutions engaged in the education of health professionals:

All health professionals should be educated to deliver patient-centered care as members of an interdisciplinary team, emphasizing evidence-based practice, quality improvement approaches and informatics."

Currently, public attention to these quality and efficiency issues in health care have reached such proportions that they are now making it to the front pages of daily newspapers; and activities focused on ways to address them are being well-funded by coalitions of business organizations (e.g. The Leapfrog Group) and by public/private stakeholders (e.g. Connecting for Health sponsored by the Markle Foundation). In addition, they are being seriously debated in both legislative and regulatory arenas in Washington, DC; for example the introduction of The National Health Information Infrastructure Act of 2003 (HR 2915), President Bush's mention of electronic health records in his 2004 State of the Union address and subsequent FY05 budget allocations to support related IT demonstration projects, and, the even more recent Health Information for Quality Improvement Act introduced by Senator Hillary Clinton, all highlight the growing public support for more rapid introduction of computer-based information systems into the health care delivery system.

The ATHENS (Advancing Technology and Healthcare Education Now at St. Scholastica) Project is the College of St. Scholastica's response to these current and anticipated changes in the health care workplace in Minnesota and nationwide. It is a project that is focused on intentionally preparing students to enter their health care professions confident and competent to use computer-based tools and associated clinical practice software applications in the practice of their respective professions. The project is funded by a grant from Title III, U.S. Department of Education.

This pioneering effort at the College of St. Scholastica has a five-year implementation timeline (2002-2007) and involves all of the academic programs within the Health Sciences Division (health information management, nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy and exercise physiology) plus the Computer Information Systems program. All programs offer both undergraduate and graduate curricula.

A remote hosting option (RHO) contract has been negotiated with Cerner Corp. to implement several applications from their HNA Millennium suite. The applications selected incorporate the electronic health record with associated applications that support orders, results reporting, clinical documentation, care planning, decision rules/alerts, evidence-based references, as well as a data repository to support management reporting. The ATHENS Project PowerStart System is scheduled for initial classroom introduction in Fall 2004.

At the present time, project activities are focused on the various application design and build aspects of the effort as well as on application training for the individuals who have been designated as Faculty Leads from each of the academic programs. Over the next two years all faculty in the Health Sciences Division will receive application training and incrementally infuse these applications into courses throughout the curricula.

The curricular goals of the project include achieving student outcomes in the areas of:

∙ Documenting, reviewing and analyzing patient data and information in electronic form;

∙ Employing real-time alerts/reminders and evidence-based references to support clinical practice and decision-making;

∙ Creating data and information management systems to assure the security and credibility of healthcare data for a broader variety of users

Designing and implementing health data and information systems that support a team-based, cross-disciplinary work environment

As the project director, I have been working with the Project Technology Lead, Janelle Wapola, and we are both health information management (HIM) professionals who are advocates of computer-based health information systems and the many exciting roles for HIM professionals in the e-HIM environment. As ATHENS Project staff we are responsible for implementing activities on the established project timelines, managing the project activities, training faculty and evaluating the impact of the project on program recruitment, faculty recruitment and curricular outcomes.

References

American Health Information Management Association (2003). A vision of the e-HIM™ future. Chicago: AHIMA.

Connectingforhealth, www.connectingforhealth.org.

Institute of Medicine. 2000. To err is human: building a safer health system. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Institute of Medicine. 2001. Crossing the quality chasm: a new health system for the 21^st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Institute of Medicine. 2003. Health professions education: a bridge to quality. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Press Release from Senator Hillary Clinton Office. Jan. 12, 2004. Senator Clinton offers proposal to improve healthcare for all Americans, http://clinton.senate.gov/~clinton/news/2004/2004112649.html

Remarks of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Health Information for Quality Improvement Act. Jan. 12, 2004, www.clinton.senate.gov/~clinton/speeches/2004112651.html.

The Leapfrog Group, www.leapfroggroup.org.

The National Health Information Infrastructure Act of 2003, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.2915.