AHRQ seeks approval of health IT workflow

Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) plans to assess how health IT affects the quality of care, Healthcare IT News reports.

The agency is asking the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to approve the information collection project: “Workflow Assessment for Health IT Toolkit Evaluation”.

The estimated total cost of the project is $793 456 over a 27-month period from 23 September 2011 to 22 December 2013. The estimated average annual cost is $352 646.

According to CMIO, through the toolkit, end-users should obtain a better understanding of the impact of health IT on workflow in ambulatory care for each of the following stages of health IT implementation: Determining system requirements; selecting a vendor; preparing for implementation; and using the system post implementation.

Users should also be able to effectively utilise the publicly available workflow tools and methods before, during and after health IT implementation while recognising commonly encountered issues in health IT implementation.

“The evaluation will consist of field assessments of use of the workflow toolkit in 18 small and medium-sized practices and gathering feedback from two Health IT Regional Extension Centres (RECs) who are providing support to some of these practices,” says the notice, published in Federal Register, on 8 March.

“The evaluation will address the issues of system validation as classically defined in software engineering: determining whether the software or system actually meets the requirements of the user to perform the relevant tasks.”