Franklin Gaylis, MD, presented “Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Clinical Practice” for the Grand Rounds in Urology audience in June 2021.
How to cite: Gaylis, Franklin. “Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Clinical Practice” June 2021. Accessed Dec 2024. https://dev.grandroundsinurology.com/leveraging-the-emr-to-improve-quality-in-clinical-practice/
Leveraging the EMR to Improve Quality in Clinical Practice – Summary:
In part 2 of a 3-part series, Franklin Gaylis, MD, FACS, Chief Scientific Officer of Genesis Healthcare Partners and Voluntary Professor of Urology at the University of California, San Diego, shows how quality reporting improves adherence to best practices in use of active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer. He explains that while guidelines have indicated for a number of years that active surveillance is often the best treatment for low-risk prostate cancer, data from quality reporting show that relatively few doctors were following this guidance a decade ago. Extracting these data based on the AUA’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) approved quality measures is difficult, requiring a manual process which is time-consuming and expensive. Active surveillance adherence provides a good case study for why having this data is important though, as Dr. Gaylis demonstrates by reviewing the results of a study he and his team began conducting in 2011. At the start of the study, audited physician feedback showed that adoption of active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer was only about 32%, far lower than guidelines recommend. With the adoption of reporting standards, the next year saw an improvement to 39% adoption. By 2014, once doctors could see others’ data, adoption increased to 58%. This increase in adherence to guidelines has continued through 2018. Dr. Gaylis concludes that quality reporting will continue to increase in importance and that audited physician feedback improves adherence to quality measures.
Parts 3 of Dr. Gaylis’ look at how the EMR template can improve outcomes in urology will be published on GRU next week. Part 1 can be viewed here.
Disclosure: Dr. Gaylis has an ownership stake in GenIT LLC, which owns WizMD, a software program created at Genesis Healthcare Partners that is used for data extraction. It currently has no significant value.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Franklin Gaylis, MD, FACS, is Chief Scientific Officer of Genesis Healthcare Partners (GHP), an Integrated Urology Group, and voluntary Professor of Urology at the University of California, San Diego. He received his MBBCh/MD (Cum Laude) from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he graduated in the top 5% of his medical school class. After a year of basic science research, Dr. Gaylis completed his general surgical training at the University of Minnesota and his specialty training in urology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, Illinois. He was nominated to the distinguished Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society at Northwestern.
Dr. Gaylis is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the California Medical Association and American Urological Association. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Urology. He lectures nationally and internationally on the subject of medical quality. His research has been published in clinical journals such as Urology, Journal of Urology, and New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Gaylis’ practice is focused on early and late stage prostate cancer. He actively pursues cutting-edge research on quality improvement and methods to optimize clinical outcomes. He has developed clinical tools aimed at improving outcomes following radical prostatectomy as well as reducing cost. Dr Gaylis and his team at Genesis Healthcare Partners have been awarded a Pay-for-Performance demonstration project by UnitedHealthcare to optimize the quality of active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer. He has also developed a urinary tract dilator instrument to facilitate the efficient removal of kidney stones that has improved the safety of the procedure and has significantly reduced costs.
