World AIDS Day was Dec. 1st, but the effort to improve the quality of HIV care and reduce the number of new infections is in full swing at New York health centers, the Community Health Care Association of New York State (CHCANYS) and Azara.
Recently, Azara had an exciting opportunity to collaborate with the New York State Department of Health, AIDS Institute to implement an easier and timelier manner of reporting eHIVQUAL data.
As of 2014, New York has the nation’s largest HIV population and ranks fourth among all states in the number of new HIV diagnoses1. Due to these staggering statistics, the AIDS Institute has committed to a variety of projects designed to improve both quality of HIV care and access to it. One specific initiative – HEALTHQUAL International – enables sustainable quality management programs through performance measurement, quality improvement and quality management programs.
Over the past year, our team at Azara has worked with the AIDS Institute to develop measures and an extract that will automatically transfer data to the eHIVQUAL system, using the CHCANYS Center for Primary Care Informatics (CPCI), powered by Azara DRVS. The participating FQHCs will have improved ease of reporting for all their data and will no longer need to manually compile a representative sample each year for submittal. This recent development will grant each center the ability to report on a regular basis and to track the impact and outcome of their clinical efforts, allowing them to drive improvements in their quality of care.
The Azara team has worked diligently during the last few months with 13 CHCANYS member centers to validate the data and report on over 10,500 HIV-positive patients. The extracts submitted include in-depth detail about each patient’s diagnosis, treatment and risk. We thank our clients and partners who worked extremely hard to get through the first submission, and our team looks forward to supporting the goals of the AIDS Institute into 2016 and beyond. We hope this project – and the tools we provide – will help the participating health centers improve care quality, reduce new HIV infections, and assist New York in its goal of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2020!
1Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV Surveillance Report, 2014; vol. 26. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/library/reports/surveillance/. Published November 2015. Accessed 12/24/2015.
Dale Ziobro is a Business Analyst for Azara Healthcare
Photo credit: Antti T. Nissinen