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Mark Cowen, M.D.
Medical Director, Quality Institute |
The Quality Institute of Saint Joseph Mercy Health System promotes patient-centered, evidence-based care through data management, analyses and clinical decision support, in addition to providing staff support for various quality-related activities throughout the health system.
Projects generally address local health care delivery issues or clinical questions, including the development of a web-based data entry and report writer for assessing neonatal intensive care. This system serves as the data management center for a randomized clinical trial of chronic heart failure care options. It also tracks functional improvement of total joint patients and analyzes the experience of patients with acute coronary syndromes.
A number of successful population-based, ambulatory care interventions have been developed and implemented for the community. One of the most impressive results is the distribution of customized patient letters, reminding patients of annual preventive and routine screenings. The backbone of this work is a large data repository into which ten million records are loaded each month from a variety of external and internal data sources. These sources include managed care claims, inpatient charge-detail level, clinical laboratory values and an electronic version of the Social Security Death Index. This complex system provides the simple but significant task of reminding patients when to see their physician for a routine screening.
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