The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is establishing several "communities of practice" to help its Beacon program establish clinical decision support technologies, care transitions programs, and pharmacy solutions and tools in healthcare improvement projects.

It's one of several steps taken as the regional model projects put together the health IT structure necessary for improvements and plan the core interventions that will be introduced in each community starting in 2011, said Aaron McKethan, director of ONC's Beacon program.

The model communities, which have already embraced electronic health records and information exchange, will determine which specific treatments best improve patient outcomes for their region's healthcare goals. The 17 ONC-funded beacon communities will trade lessons they have learned and share best practices.

The shared practice centers will be led by experts in the field and beacon leaders.

ONC is also developing a performance measurement and reporting function that will enable the beacon communities to track their own results and make course corrections along the way, McKethan said.

Although some of the communities will use solutions that have already demonstrated success on a broader scale, "any effort to achieve large-scale, innovation-driven change necessitates designing and trying new approaches and using data to inform refinements along the way," he said Dec. 8 in an online post.

"We are encouraging beacon communities to embark on a process of discovery through which they will learn their way toward lasting healthcare improvement in their communities," he said.

For example, the Detroit beacon community will test the use of communications with Medicaid patients who have diabetes to help them keep their physician appointments, organize their medications, and receive personalized health reminders.

The idea is to engage patients using simple text messaging technologies to be part of a larger strategy for keeping disease under control, McKethan said.
 
Several other communities will deploy telehealth services to remotely monitor the health of patients with chronic disease to help avert complications. Although the evidence cited in healthcare literature for remote patient monitoring is mixed, these beacon communities will examine the critical factors that can make remote monitoring more consistently successful in avoiding preventable hospitalizations. 

Expanding on what beacon community awardees learn, ONC has partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to sponsor an online forum, called "Transformation has Begun," about how to coordinate various regional healthcare improvement projects to maximize their collective impact.

ONC has also created short videos that explain the beacon program.