Lunch On Your Own
See inside cover of program book for locations and costs for lunch.

Track A: New and Improved: Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes and HIT (#51)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

In this session, we will present the second edition of the handbook "Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide." The first edition, published in 2007, discussed patient registry design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation. The new edition includes updates on these topics, plus new sections on linking registry data, interfacing registries with EHRs, using registries for product safety assessments, and stopping registries. Specific topics covered in this session will include:

• Overview of the purpose of the handbook and the process of creating and updating the document
• Review of major changes in the second edition
• Interactive discussion with audience on topics for future editions

Moderator: Elise Berliner, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Nancy A. Dreyer, Outcome Sciences

Richard Gliklich, Outcome Sciences (Select for presentation)

Track A: AHRQ's Health IT Portfolio: The Year That Was and The Year To Come (#61)

AHRQ's Director of Health IT, P. Jon White, M.D., will present an overview of the past year of accomplishments and activities of the health IT portfolio, and describe activities for the coming year including interactions with other Federal programs.

Moderator: P. Jon White, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speaker: P. Jon White, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track B: So You Think You Can Coordinate Care? Prove It! (#28)

Ensuring that patients receive appropriate care requires intentional organization and communication among participants in the patient's care, including the patient and family. This session for researchers and clinicians focuses on two important aspects of care coordination in ambulatory settings—how to do it and how to measure it.

Moderator: Janice Genevro, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Carol VanDeusen Lukas, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs/Boston University School of Public Health (Select for presentation 1 and presentation 2)

Kathryn McDonald, Stanford University (Select for presentation)

Track D: Reducing HAIs: Effective Change Strategies From a National Collaborative of Regional HAI Programs (#69)

This interactive session will present a variety of effective change strategies for health care organizations to reduce HAIs. Participants will learn about the successes, facilitators, and barriers to implementing and sustaining these efforts.

Moderator: Eileen Hogan, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Chris George, Michigan Health & Hospital Association Keystone Center (Select for presentation)

Anthony D. Harris, University of Maryland (Select for presentation)

Track E: Understanding and Improving the Delivery of Care in the Emergency Department (#33)

There are over 120 million visits to emergency departments annually. It is therefore simply not possible to talk about understanding and improving health care without a discussion of care in the emergency department. This session not only highlights some of AHRQ's important contributions in the area of the emergency department, but also provides examples of the different mechanisms through which AHRQ makes those contributions (i.e., contracts, grants, and intramural research in partnership with sister, Federal agencies).

Moderator: Ryan Mutter, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Brendan Carr, University of Pennsylvania (Select for presentation)

Shahed Iqbal, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Patrick Romano, University of California, Davis (Select for presentation)

Discussant: Jesse M. Pines, George Washington University (Select for presentation)

Track E: Community Care Coordination Score Card: Raising the Bar Across Communities (#57)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

The health care delivery system lacks a standardized approach to measuring performance (and outcomes) in the process of care coordination. In order to transform the delivery of health and social services, communities need to be involved. The Community Care Coordination Learning Network (CCCLN) is a group of diverse communities across the country that came together to create a scorecard prototype to standardize data collection and reporting on the community level. CCCLN developed two access-to-care measures that were used by a variety of agencies and providers within their communities. This session will have a brief overview of the project and then a discussion by four panelists highlighting the challenges, lessons learned, and benefits to their programs and to the community.

Moderator: Mary Overall, Central Oklahoma Integrated Network System, Inc. (Select for presentation)

Speakers: Sherry E. Gray, St. Vincent Health (Select for presentation)

Sarah Redding, Community Health Access Project (Select for presentation)

Daryl T. Smith, University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (Select for presentation)

Break

All poster presenters will stand by their posters at this time.

Plenary Session:

21st Century Health Care: What Does It Mean To Achieve Success in Quality, Value, and Access to Care?

Moderator: Carolyn M. Clancy, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Speakers:

Panelists:
Maulik Joshi, Health Research and Educational Trust
James W. Mold, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Debra L. Ness, National Partnership for Women and Families

Lunch On Your Own
See inside cover of program book for locations and costs for lunch.

Track A: Something Borrowed, Something New: Developing an Agenda for Patient-Centered Mental Health (#35)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

This panel discussion will present the results of an Issues Exploration Forum convened by AHRQ that brought together a wide spectrum of stakeholders, Federal partners, experts, and Effective Healthcare Program investigators in a dialogue about issues in selected areas of mental health and the opportunity to address these issues using a comparative effectiveness framework. The panel will present and discuss initial research priorities and future direction of the comparative effectiveness research efforts to expand and promote patient-centered care. The session will be of interest to a wide audience, including policymakers, clinicians, researchers, and consumers.

Moderator: Daniel Jonas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Select for presentation)

Speakers: King Davis, The University of Texas at Austin (Select for presentation)

Harold A. Pincus, Columbia University

Steven Sharfstein, Sheppard Pratt Health System (Select for presentation)

Sonia Tyutyulkova, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track A: Evaluating Emerging Technologies: Is the Future Now?? (#50)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

The AHRQ Effective Health Care Program has introduced a series of rapid reports called "Technical Briefs," to provide an early objective description of the state of the science of emerging technologies, a potential framework for assessing the applications and implications of the intervention, a summary of completed and ongoing research, and an analysis of future research needs. In this session, we will discuss the results of two of the first technical briefs, one on particle beam radiation treatments for cancer and one on fetal surgery. Although the two topics are very different, some common themes are apparent, including a lack of coordination of ongoing and completed studies and diffusion into clinical practice. One remarkable counterexample discussed in the fetal surgery report is the NIH-funded MOMS study on fetal surgery for myelomeningocele. In this case, there is a national agreement to only provide the surgery as part of the clinical trial, so that pre-natal vs. post-natal surgery could be comprehensively evaluated. The session will include an interactive discussion about whether the MOMS study could be a model for evaluating other emerging technologies.

Moderator: Elise Berliner, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Speakers: Katherine E. Hartmann, Vanderbilt University (Select for presentation)

Susan Tolivaisa, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Select for presentation)

Thomas Trikalinos, Tufts Medical Center (Select for presentation)

Track A: Building a Learning Network To Inform EHR Adoption and Meaningful Use: AHRQ's Role in Support of the Health IT Regional Extension Centers (#65)

The HITECH Act provides incentives and support for health care providers to adopt and meaningfully use certified electronic health records (EHRs), including a system of Regional Extension Centers to assist primary care practices in their progress. This session will describe how AHRQ has partnered with the Office of the National Coordination for Health IT (ONC) to establish the National Health IT Research Center to gather and share best practices among Regional Extension Centers.

Moderator: Matthew Quinn, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Ned Ellington, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (Select for presentation)

P. Jon White, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track B: Understanding Trends in Medical Care Costs: Analyzing the Impact of Changes in the Health Care System (#1)

In this session, we will take advantage of the unique capability of MEPS to examine spending on medical services. We will apply existing and diverse ways of categorizing health care spending to profile similarities and differences in spending across subgroups. Commentators will discuss factors associated with increases in health care costs and consider which tools are likely to be particularly useful in containing costs while maintaining or improving quality.

Moderator: Joel Cohen, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Jessica S. Banthin, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Eric Sarpong, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track B: Improving Patient Flow in the Emergency Department: Approaches for Reducing Wait Times, Improving Care, and Enhancing Patient Satisfaction (#4)

Hospital representatives will share their own real-world experiences with implementing strategies to improve ED flow. Findings from an AHRQ-funded study of six hospitals that tackled the problem of ED crowding will also be discussed and will focus on facilitators and barriers to implementing interventions to improve patient flow, resources involved in implementation, and associated changes in measures of crowding. The audience will be encouraged to bring questions about challenges they might anticipate, and solutions they might try, in implementing similar strategies within their own hospitals.

Moderator: Marjorie Shofer, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Joe Guarisco, Ochsner Health System (Select for presentation)

Jeffrey Margulies, Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center (Select for presentation)

Megan McHugh, Health Research and Educational Trust (Select for presentation)

Track B: USPSTF Recommendations: Process and Impact on Real-World Provision of Care (#25)

Process changes at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) that have been under way since the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA) was passed in 2008 will be explored, and challenged, in a lively discussion by a representative of the USPSTF on the one hand and a representative of the specialty community on the other. A moderator with long experience in guideline development will run interference.

Moderator: Mary Barton, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Louis Jacques, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

John Santa, Consumer Reports (Select for presentation)

Jean Slutsky, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track D: Risk Informed Design of Interventions (#19)

The use of proactive risk assessments to improve patient safety is growing within health care. Risk assessments provide remarkable value by identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing points in the care process that could result in patient harm. The identification of risks alone does not result in safer care. Targeted quality improvements must be designed. The aims of this session are to present results from actual risk analyses from the AHRQ Risk Informed Intervention Program and their resulting safety designs.

Moderator: Robert Borotkanics, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Virginia A. Moyer, Baylor College of Medicine

Donna M. Woods, Northwestern University

Track E: MONAHRQ—Input Your Data, Output Your Web Site (#34)

MONAHRQ is a data analysis/Web builder tool that anyone with hospital discharge data can use to build their own Web site. MONAHRQ Web sites can publicly report hospital quality of care, track utilization by hospital (numbers of discharges with specific diagnoses and procedures, costs, length of stay), map preventable hospitalizations by county, and map conditions and procedures by county. This session will demonstrate the Web site and provide insights from early adopters of the tool.

Moderator: Anne Elixhauser, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Anne Elixhauser, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Joseph Greenway, University of Las Vegas (Select for presentation)

Carol Sniegoski, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track D: We Need You! A National Quality Strategy (#80)

This session will highlight the Affordable Care Act mandate and work to date on developing a National Quality Strategy for the Nation.The session will provide opportunity for comment and dialogue as well as instruction for ongoing input and engagement.

Speakers: Carolyn M. Clancy and Nancy Wilson, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track E: Key "Do's" of Public Report Design: Experts Weigh In and Review Three NEW AHRQ Resources (#71)

Public reporting is in its infancy and there is little research, unfortunately, to tell us what features work best. Two of the Nation's leading public report experts will share their top recommendations on public report design. Hear how each completes this sentence: "If you only do three things, please be sure to ____." The session will close with an overview of three new AHRQ tools to guide public report development: (1) Model Public Report Elements: A Sampler; (2) Public Report Design: A Decision Guide for Community Quality Collaboratives; and (3) Talking Quality.

Moderator: Jan De La Mare, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: R. Adams Dudley, University of California, San Francisco (Select for presentation)

Dale Shaller, Shaller Consulting Group (Select for presentation)

Track A: Quality Improvement Initiatives: National Implementation of CUSP and TeamSTEPPS (#18)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

This session will present the lessons learned from two models of dissemination of quality improvement initiatives: the national implementation of the comprehensive unit-based safety program (CUSP) and the TeamSTEPPS evidence-based teamwork system. Participants also will gain an understanding of how they can leverage these national implementation efforts at their institutions.

Moderator: James Battles, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Steve Hines, Health Research and Educational Trust (Select for presentation)

Deborah A. Milne, American Institutes for Research (Select for presentation)

Track A: Redesigning Care Delivery: Demonstrations and Research on Health System Change (#49)

AHRQ recently awarded over $30 million in grants for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) on improvement of health care delivery and for demonstrations of ways to spread CER findings through delivery system and community networks. The solicitations, which were funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, covered areas such as care management, primary care transformation, new payment options, care for the chronically ill and for vulnerable populations, and reducing unnecessary rehospitalization. This session will provide an overview of this initiative and brief presentations by new ARRA grantees on their studies' implications for health system reform. The featured speakers will be announced at the session, since their names were not available when this agenda was prepared.

Moderator: Michael Harrison, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Track A: State and Regional Demonstrations of HIE (#63)

In 2004 and 2005 AHRQ awarded contracts for six State and regional demonstrations in health IT (SRD) for 5-year projects to support data-sharing and interoperability activities on a State or regional level aimed at improving the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for patients and populations. Several of the SRDs will present the lessons they have learned on the cutting edge of implementing health information exchange, including how new and emerging health information exchange initiatives can leverage those lessons.

Moderator: Erin Grace, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Mark Frisse, Vanderbilt University

Amy Zimmerman, Rhode Island Department of Health

Track B: Achieving Greater Access to Health Care: Factors Associated With Access and Use of Medical Care Services (#3)

Taking advantage of MEPS' capacity to relate health care utilization to the insurance coverage and other characteristics of people in the United States, this session will explore trends in coverage and use of medical services among key population subgroups. We will identify distinctions in need across key subgroups of the population and consider to what extent disparities in care that currently exist are associated with underlying characteristics of the population. Commentators will react to the findings in terms of the implications they see for key features of national health care reform design.

Moderator: Joel Cohen, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Jessica Vistnes, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Samuel H. Zuvekas, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Track B: What To Do First: Optimizing and Prioritizing Health Care for Complex Patients (#24)

Grantees of AHRQ's Prevention and Care Management portfolio have been studying complex patients and addressing important questions about how comorbid conditions impact the effectiveness and risks of various management strategies addressing one of their conditions. A set of novel findings will be presented by investigators and the program staff, interspersed with vignettes about related patient care scenarios.

Moderator: Mary Barton, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Cynthia Boyd, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Katherine Kahn, University of California, Los Angeles

Maureen A. Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant: Wayne J. Katon, University of Washington

Track C: Future Directions for the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports (#10)

Supported by AHRQ, IOM recently made recommendations about how to improve the National Healthcare Reports. This session will examine these recommendations and changes to the 2010 Reports in response to these recommendations. Presenters will include members of the IOM committee and HHS staff who work on the Reports.

Moderator: Ernie Moy, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Speakers: Sheila P. Burke, Harvard University (Select for presentation)

Kevin Fiscella, University of Rochester Medical Center

Reactant: Nancy Wilson, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Track D: Patient Safety Organizations in Their Second Year: The Momentum Builds (#22)

This session has been approved for 1.5 continuing education credits. See continuing education section for more information.

Since the Patient Safety Rule was finalized in January 2009, AHRQ has listed over 80 new Patient Safety Organizations. This presentation will provide an update on the listing activities at AHRQ and a snapshot of two PSOs' current activities using the Patient Safety Rule to reduce risk to patients.

Moderator: William Munier, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Select for presentation)

Speakers: Rory S. Jaffe, California Hospital Patient Safety Organization (Select for presentation)

Mark Keroack, University HealthSystem Consortium (Select for presentation)

Track E: Readmissions to the Acute Care Setting: A Broader Scope Changes the Picture (#38)

This session will present findings and invite discussion about readmissions and revisits to the acute care setting using large, all-payer inpatient and emergency department databases. The addition of emergency department visits to the analyses and interpretation of readmissions for a variety of conditions is important for clinicians and policymakers as improvements and incentives are implemented.

Moderator: Claudia Steiner, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: David C. Brousseau, Medical College of Wisconsin

Bernard Friedman, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Joanna Jiang, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

William D. Spector, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Track E: Measure Selection and Methods Matter—Two NEW AHRQ Resources on Public Reporting (#70)

The road to producing a public report begins with a series of measure and data decisions, which ultimately have a huge impact on the resulting scores that appear in a public report. This session features two new AHRQ resources developed to assist community quality collaboratives, States, and other report card sponsors with their decision-making. The first, Selecting Quality and Resource Use Measures: A Decision Guide for Community Quality Collaboratives, is an evidence summary organized around 26 questions. The second, Methodological Considerations in Generating Provider Performance Scores, is a white paper that documents the critical set of 20 data decisions that precede public reporting and discusses the implications of alternate decision paths.

Moderator: Peggy McNamara, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Speakers: Cheryl Damberg, RAND Corporation (Select for presentation)

Patrick Romano, University of California, Davis (Select for presentation)

Salon Foyer and Salons A-C