Southern Piedmont Beacon Community Project (SPBC Project)

The Southern Piedmont Beacon Community (SPBC) consists of Cabarrus, Rowan, and Stanly counties. The SPBC Project builds on this community’s current advanced usage and penetration of health information technology (HIT) lo create a learning laboratory for the next generation of community-based HIT-enabled improvements to health and care. The project’s chief care goals are to Improve care and outcomes associated with the chronic diseases identified as priorities by recent community health assessments- notably hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, ischemic vascular disease/post myocardial infarction, and asthma- and lo improve preventive care. Related cost efficiency goals focus on reducing preventable hospital readmissions, reducing duplicate imaging tests, and reducing unnecessary emergency department utilization. The project also seeks to involve patients, consumers and their lay caregivers in seeking these health improvements and cost efficiencies in multi-modal ways. HIT-supported program elements are planned to provide patients with timely electronic access to their health information. tools to make use of this information, and tools to provide new information in cooperation with their care providers. Sharing the right data in a timely way depends critically on having a general electronic health information exchange mechanism that connects providers, patients, and public health. The project supports this need by connecting the existing “silos” of providers along with the new EHR users. patients, and public health. This resulting community HIE will leverage the NC HIE services under development and implement community HIE services where needed.

 

Principal Investigator: Carlton Moore, PhD

Funding: Southern Piedmont Community Care Plan via US Dept of Health & Human Service

Total Project Period: 06/01/11-05/31/13