Kaiser Permanente automates quality reporting to Joint Commission

Researchers at Kaiser Permanente have shown that it's possible to automate partially or fully the collection of data from an EHR for public quality reporting. They've also proved that this automation saves money, compared to manual data abstraction. However, their paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) cautions that their experience "illustrates the gap between the current and desired states of automated quality reporting." In 2010, Kaiser Permanente's care reporting staff began to retool the Joint Commission core measures for automated quality reporting. The purpose of this program was to make reporting by Kaiser's 37 hospitals more efficient and more reliable, said Terhilda Garrido, Kaiser's VP for health IT transformation and analytics.