Means of data extraction from VistA for QI project...

[DGelman]

I'm trying to assist a group at our hospital which has a grant to
improve heart failure care. I've been shocked that we have no
electronic registry of patients with this diagnosis, and thus no means
of doing directed VistA searches against this group of patients to
gather data to help guide care improvements. A few questions:

1. Is it possible to run VistA searches against personal lists of
patients?
2. Is it best to create a so called reporting reminder to identfy the
cohort of heart failure patients, then use this reporting reminder as
a jump-off for generating reminder reports based on this group?

Quarterly retrospective data is too slow. I haven't found data in the
Proclarity Cubes that suits our needs.

Thanks,

David Gelman, MD
Manhattan VA Hospital
(212)686-7500x3800
david....@va.gov

[Sam Habiel]

VISTA is not as good as RPMS (Indian Health Service's) system at
managing population health.

Using VISTA, it does look like you have answered your own questions.
1. Yes and No. If you have the assistance of a VISTA programmer, then
definitely yes. You can run VISTA against lists of patients which are
already defined in VISTA using Reminder Reporting. I don't know if
there is an end user capability to add any patient at a time to a user
specified list in VISTA. I haven't seen it, but it's easy to program.
2. You can use the Reminder Patient Lists feature of VISTA to
periodically query the database for new patients with specific
inclusion and exclusion criteria.

"Quarterly retrospective data is too slow."

Sure! Is daily okay?

Your best resource is your local Clinical Applications Coordinator,
who may be able to put you in touch with other experts.

Reminders Manager Manual:
http://www.va.gov/vdl/documents/Clinical/CPRS-Clinical_Reminders/pxrm_2_mm.pdf

Sam
PS: Registry functionality is available in a limited way in VISTA. It
my understanding it's not extensively used. See this page:
http://www.va.gov/vdl/application.asp?appid=126

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[Syed]

VistA has Clinical Reminder tool. Using that tool you can create any
kind of reports ( PQRI, Meaningful Use etc). RPMS is still running an
out dated clinical reminder version ( 1.5 as compared to 2.0 ). In
Indian Health services I have not met anyone yet who has a real
knowledge of clinical reminder. I have heard they are planing to
upgrade it to 2.0 but not in near future.
If you need to configure your Ehr for reports you can contact me.
Syed Bokhari MD

> david.gel...@va.gov

[David Whitten]

Since Dr David Gelman, seems to be working at a VA Medical Center in
Manhattan, I expect he has access to Clinical Reminders 2.0, however he
may not know how to use it effectively for this need.

Dr. Gellman,  I don't know if you have heard of the Clinical Reminders training
class that was sponsored by WorldVistA this last year, but if not, you might
learn important details if you listen to the recordings.

David

[Syed]

Yep David there is lot of material on Clinical reminder available on
web (VA). That's how I learned. Its worth it to learn Clinical
reminder.
-Syed