CHICAGO – Leveraging efficiencies of the electronic health record, four independent physician practices have earned the position of finalist for the 2011 HIMSS Ambulatory Care Davies Award of Excellence.

The four practices are:

• Community Care Physicians, LLC, is a 200-provider multi-specialty group located in Latham, NY. With the electronic health record, the practice has experienced decreased chart pulls, lower costs associated with routine tasks and transcription, and the ability to recapture space once filled with paper charts. Community Care has been contributing data to its RHIO for 18 months, as one of the founding board members of Health Information Xchange New York (HIXNY) and has developed an interface that can automatically dump data to state mandated registries.

• Fallon Clinic in Worcester, Mass., is a physician-owned and run not-for-profit multispecialty group practice with 357 providers representing 30 specialties located in 23 sites throughout central Massachusetts. Through a carefully planned and broadly inclusive needs assessment, vendor selection, and implementation and optimization of the EHR, Fallon Clinic was able to achieve measurable improvements in the quality, safety, efficiency and satisfaction with healthcare delivery.
• James F. Holsinger, MD, FC, opened his solo family medicine practice in Keokuk, Iowa, a rural community of 20,000 in a county with the lowest unemployment rate in the state. The practice started in 2003 with no patients and two part-time visiting specialists renting space in the same building. Now, Holsinger has 1,400 active patients and is the first fully automated clinic in the area. Profitable in its first 20 months, the practice implemented, and uses in its day-to-day operation, nearly every EHR function and interface available. Holsinger has participated in Medicare's Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) and e-prescribing incentives and has achieved the highest level of quality in all but one area in its largest commercial insurer's pay-for-performance program.

• Women's Health Advantage (WHA) is Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana's largest OB-GYN practice, serving a population of approximately one million people, with three full-time offices in Fort Wayne and four clinics in outlying communities. One cited improvement in patient care focused on the practice's EHR tasking system with most wait time eliminated allowing the phone nurses to lower patient on-hold time by 24 percent while handling 44 percent more calls, all with one less phone nurse. The use of e-prescribing, improved coding systems and a patient portal, have also added to streamlined and improved processes with the use of health IT.



"We congratulate each of these finalists for their EHR implementation and ongoing delivery of quality patient care," said Daniel Griffin, MD, chair of the HIMSS Ambulatory Care Davies Award Committee, and past Davies winner.  "We look forward to the next step in our award process, which includes a site visit team observing workflow and system use by various providers at each of the four ambulatory care finalists for the HIMSS Davies Award."

Griffin said winners would be selected by the committee who will vote following completion of the site visits.  Up to four winners will be announced in September.