The Crescent City Beacon Community in New Orleans is one of 17 ONC-funded Beacon Communities building and strengthening local health IT infrastructure and testing innovative approaches to make measurable improvements in health, care and cost. This community faced a significant challenge with its PCMH implementation in the community clinic setting: deciphering how to use technology in a way to support care team functions while reducing, rather than increasing, staff and provider workloads. Hear how the Crescent City Beacon Community and its clinical partners conducted a cross-walk of the NCQA 2011 PCMH standards with current workflows for each standard to inform SuccessEHS of system design limitations and to suggest enhancements that would facilitate adherence to medical home standards. Ultimately, SuccessEHS used those suggestions to enhance its system. The CCBC group also worked with SuccessEHS to include recommended PCMH workflows in a toolkit for other SuccessEHS clients. These collaborative activities helped CCBC clinical partners with their NCQA certification, and is preparing them for Meaningful Use attestations.
Janhavi M. Kirtane, MBA, is the Director of Clinical Transformation and Dissemination for the Beacon Community Program, where she supports execution, innovation and learning collaborative efforts related to clinical interventions. She also leads national efforts to share program-wide lessons learned, and supports Beacon Community efforts to drive local adoption of promising IT-enabled interventions. Prior to the joining the ONC, Janhavi spent 10 years working with healthcare delivery leaders across the country to lead strategic planning and clinical operations initiatives, most recently as a Senior Consultant with the Chartis Group, LLC, and previously with APM. Janhavi's project portfolio included ED and OR redesign, inpatient care model redesign, integrated delivery system strategy, and mergers and acquisition operational evaluation. Her recent clients have included academic medical centers, children's hospitals, and multi-hospital systems. Janhavi has a BA in Economics, with honors, from Harvard College and an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Eboni Price-Haywood, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine, Co-Executive Director of the Tulane Community Health Centers, and Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for the Office of Community Affairs and Health Policy. She is also an Operating Board member of the Crescent City Beacon Community Project (CCBC) in New Orleans, LA. Dr. Price-Haywood is actively involved in moving the state of Louisiana’s model of care towards the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). As CMO, in 2008, Dr. Price-Haywood led six of Tulane's community-based clinics through the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) PCMH recognition process of which two are Tier 3. Key PCMH principles initiated under her leadership at the Tulane Community Health Centers include implementation of service delivery that is culturally and linguistically appropriate, multi-disciplinary team-based, driven by scientific evidence, and coordinated via electronic health records to enhance patient access to timely high quality care. One of her key roles on the CCBC board is project leader of CCBC’s collaboration with an EHR vendor widely used in safety-net community health centers in Louisiana. Dr. Price-Haywood and her team are providing critical appraisals of the vendor’s electronic medical record system software design, its impact on the end users’ workflow, and system-related facilitators and barriers to adhering to PCMH standards. The end product of this collaboration will be software enhancements and a related toolkit to help other clients achieve PCMH recognition while optimizing the use of health information technology. Through her work in this area, she is gaining recognition as an expert in medical home transformation and implementation of health information technology.
Anjum Khurshid, PhD, MBBS (MD), MPAff is the Director of Health Systems Development for the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI). Dr. Khurshid oversees a wide range of community health initiatives including quality improvement of primary care and behavioral health services within community health clinics, comprehensive wellness and clinical services in school-based health centers and the Crescent City Beacon Community program, a federally-funded pilot program focused on improved management of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, through the use of information technology and electronic medical records.
Dr. Khurshid was the former Director of the Health & Behavioral Risk Research Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management & Informatics. He was also the Director of Evaluation and Research for the Integrated Care Collaboration, a community collaborative of providers and public health agencies, which maintains a fully functional health information exchange in Central Texas to coordinate care for vulnerable populations.
Dr. Khurshid earned his PhD in Public Policy and Master in Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and his medical degree from King Edward Medical University, Lahore. He is a recipient of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship, LBJ Foundation Academic Excellence Award, J.J. Pickle Fellowship, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Merit Fellowship. His work has been presented and published both in the United States and abroad.
Maria Ludwick is an Associate Director in the Health Systems Division at the Louisiana Public Health Institute. She is currently overseeing the chronic care management activities under the Crescent City Beacon Community program. For the past 4 years, she managed the federal Primary Care Access and Stabilization Grant (PCASG), which was intended to stabilize and expand access to high quality and sustainable primary and behavioral health care in the Greater New Orleans area post-Hurricane Katrina. She has 18 years of experience in healthcare and public health with an emphasis in health systems program planning and evaluation, quality improvement and performance measurement, and health information systems. She has held senior management positions at the Louisiana Office Public Health and at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. She holds a Master of Business Administration from Tulane University Freeman School of Business, and a Master of Public Health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
Deborah Even is a Clinical Quality Improvement Program Manager for the Crescent City Beacon Community Grant. Deborah has been a nurse for 12 years and worked at Tulane Hospital and other local hospitals in Neonatology and General Medicine. She most recently worked as a nurse care manager at Daughters of Charity Health Services where she was instrumental in improving chronic disease outcomes as well as helping the organization’s three clinics go paperless on an electronic medical record. She has been with LPHI for 2 years and has provided technical assistance and support for grantee organizations on evidence-based, population disease management using HIT. She currently assists in managing and supporting a coaching project to implement CCBC interventions in primary care. She is a dedicated volunteer in the New Orleans community, particularly in the area of healthcare for uninsured and minority populations.
Deborah obtained her bachelor’s degree in Nursing from the University of Costa Rica and holds a master’s degree in International Public Health from Tulane University. She is currently pursuing a Family Nurse Practitioner degree at Duke University.
