Our DARTNet partners

A primary focus of our efforts right now are on recruiting, determining eligibility and onboarding of the 40 clinical practices needed to participate in our project. One of the requirements of a practice participating in the study is to have electronic medical records and have the ability to share them. The electronic health records will be used to create community panels at each practice, determine eligible subjects for recruitment and to measure patient health outcomes.

To accomplish this rather large task of electronic health record access, data collection and transfer, we have contracted with the DARTNet Institute. DARTNet is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that conducts research, supports collaboration among health care providers and organizations, and hosts data sets of health information for quality improvement and research.

http://www.dartnet.info

DARTNet’s role in the project will be to:

• Extract, transform, load and transfer electronic health records
• Work with each organization to guarantee all required data elements are included, no extraneous or hidden data elements are present, and that data relationships are maintained
• Create a community panel from each of the participating clinical practices
• Review the EHR data, identify potential subjects and obtain consent.

 

Study patients will be a randomly selected subset of the eligible patients. DARTNet will verbal consent our patient subjects. Potential subjects will be told the purpose of the study, that we are requesting permission to use a limited set of their health data and that we are requesting them to complete a brief web or telephone survey once a year for 2 years. Only after they have permission from the patient will any data be transferred to the research team.

Some of the DARTNet Team working on the project:

Wilson D. Pace, MD, FAAFP CMO, DARTNet Institute is a Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver, the Green-Edelman Chair Emeritus for Practice-based Research, and the past Director of the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network. Dr. Pace’s research has focused on patient centered health information technology, behavioral change (both patient and clinician behavior), practice reorganization and patient safety. He served on the Institute of Medicine’s committee studying the recognition and prevention of medication errors which resulted in the report entitled “Preventing Medication Errors.” His behavioral change work has involved multiple technology and clinical decision support related projects. Other projects have focused on improving care for depression in general, post-partum depression specifically, asthma and chronic kidney disease. He is the primary architect of the DARTNet Institute, a collaborative of electronic health record enabled research networks.

Deejay Zwaga and Lucy Scott. Deejay is the project manager at DARTNet for the data side of the grant in the Dallas office. Lucy Scott project manager for patient recruitment for IBH-PC. Lucy has a PhD in linguistics and speaks 6 languages but for this project she will focus on English and Spanish. Deejay and Lucy are in the DARTNet Dallas office.