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HIP Investigator, Dr. Elizabeth Cox in collaboration with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), Dr. Melissa Gilkey (University of North Carolina), and members of the PROKids team received a Carbone Cancer Center Rural Cancer Pilot Award. The project, “On-Time HPV Vaccination for Rural Wisconsin Youth” will help inform interventions at the healthcare system-level that focus on low rates of HPV vaccination in rural Wisconsin. The project will use WCHQ data to develop and validate metrics of on-time HPV vaccination initiation and completion in Wisconsin health systems.

About 1.45 million individuals in Wisconsin, have some mental or behavioral health issues, and the percentage of major depressive episodes for adults aged 18 and over is 6.56%. The mental health disorder treatment gap in Wisconsin is 49%, which equals roughly 441,378 individuals annually not receiving the care they need. Screening for depression within primary care as well as investing in evidence-based behavioral health delivery models in the primary care setting allows for greater health care capacity and improvements in health outcomes.

HIP Investigator, Dr. Yao Liu assisted in the development of the Telehealth Resources for Eye Care During COVID-19, a Resource from the Ocular Telehealth Special Interest Group (SIG). The document consists of resources that can assist eye care providers in the rapid transition to telehealth for providing necessary eye care while reducing risks to patients and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The resource document includes sections on AAO resources on billing/coding, checking vision, innovative strategies, audio telehealth, video telehealth, and documentation.

With the onset of COVID-19, primary care systems across the country are rapidly changing clinical operations to limit in-person ambulatory visits for infection-control reasons. The Primary care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative quickly redesigned primary care in their institution to introduce telemedicine visits as a practical alternative to provide needed care remotely. The innovation was the rapid development and implementation of workflows to standardize billable telemedicine visits in the primary care setting.

With the release of the 2015 American Thyroid Association (ATA) Management Guidelines for Adults with Differentiated Thyroid Cancer, treatment decisions for low-risk thyroid cancer became more complicated. Although the guidelines were meant to supplement shared patient-healthcare provider decision-making, the patient-provider deliberation often fails to meet the informational standards for patients and can often exclude available treatments. Low-risk thyroid cancer patients often don’t know what questions to ask, while the physicians report not knowing how to obtain patients’ preferences and include them into treatment decisions.

With the onset of COVID-19, the Health Innovation Program (HIP) determined they could use the reporting infrastructure they have been developing over the last several years, in partnership with Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), to rapidly produce reports with reliable and accurate data for health systems who are WCHQ members. These reports can help the health systems to prepare for and respond to this pandemic.

The reports provide details on primary care provider panels, clinics, and ZIP codes for each health system and helps the health system to identify the numbers and prevalence of people who are at risk for severe complications from COVID-19.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, UW-Madison researchers within the School of Medicine and Public Health are quickly adapting to support Wisconsin health officials. Researchers at the Health Innovation Program (HIP), who have been working to improve health care using electronic health record data voluntarily provided by over 20 Wisconsin health systems through the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), have mobilized to determine how they could rapidly use these data to help those on the front line of the battle against COVID-19 to support the direction of efforts towards the places in Wisconsin that need it most.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, critically ill patients have been hospitalized and isolated from their families and loved ones. In many hospitals, the palliative care team has been charged with maintaining communication between the critical care team and their patients’ families. Dr. Gretchen Schwarze and her team along with Dr. Toby Campbell created the Best Case/Worst Case: ICU (COVID-19) communication toolkit to assist separated families and to help them develop an understanding of their loved one’s illness, prognostic awareness and the range of possible outcomes.