Lessons Learned from Beacon Communities
The 17 ONC-funded Beacon Communities have compiled and synthesized their lessons learned from building health IT infrastructure, driving population health improvement and testing innovative approaches during the three-year program. This information is now available in six Learning Guides offering proven strategies and actionable information that can be adapted by hospitals, health systems, individual practices, and health-focused community organizations to help them advance community-level health care transformation using health IT.
The Learning Guides include:
- Key foundational elements to support successful planning and implementation
- Strategic and implementation objectives with execution tactics and case studies
- Resources used by Beacon Communities such as process maps and sample documents
The six Beacon Learning Guides are:
- Improving Hospital Transitions and Care Coordination Using Automated Admission, Discharge and Transfer Alerts – This Learning Guide documents the approaches, lessons learned, and best practices of Beacon Communities for implementing automated alerts based on hospital admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) events. It includes implementation objectives and supporting tactics for success, patient and community stories, resource and cost considerations, and other reference documents.
- Strengthening Care Management with Health Information Technology – This Learning Guide documents the approaches, lessons learned, and best practices of Beacon Communities for implementing various IT-enabled care management services. The lessons are grouped by strategic objectives and include illustrations from Beacon Communities.
- Capturing High Quality Electronic Health Records Data to Support Performance Improvement – This Learning Guide, targeted to individual practices as well as communities, discusses the key steps necessary to improve EHR data quality to support performance improvement activities, including quality measurement and improvement, performance reporting, and data needed to support payment reform initiatives.
- Enabling Health Information Exchange to Support Community Goals – This Learning Guide is designed to help communities that are interested in establishing or enhancing existing HIE services to support their community health goals. Specifically this Guide provides practical information about the current landscape of exchange, available infrastructure and services, when regional collaboration offers value, and how to realize goals around exchange in a multi-stakeholder environment.
- Driving Clinical Transformation in a Practice Setting with Health Information Technology – This Learning Guide documents the approaches, lessons learned, and best practices of Beacon Communities for using health IT to support clinical transformation in the practice setting. The lessons are grouped by strategic objectives and include illustrations from Beacon Communities.
- Building Technology Capabilities for Population Health Measurement at the Community Level – This Learning Guide focuses on the measurement and analytics aspects of population health management.