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Enhancing Surveillance of Maternal Health Clinical Practices and Outcomes with Federally Qualified Health Centers’ (FQHCs) Electronic Health Records Visit Data

Enhancing Surveillance of Maternal Health Clinical Practices and Outcomes with Federally Qualified Health Centers’ (FQHCs) Electronic Health Records Visit Data
Agency
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Start Date
  • 3/2021
Functionality
  • Standardized Collection of Standardized Clinical Data
  • Linking of Clinical and Other Data for Research
  • Use of Clinical Data for Research

 

STATUS: Active Project

BACKGROUND

This proposed project will help enhance National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) data collection procedures from CY2021 for maternal health visits to FQHCs and expand these collection procedures in CY2022. This will include increasing the sample of FQHCs and evaluating the feasibility of enhancing the maternal health data from the EHRs by creating new data linkages to the NDI and HUD administrative data sources.

NCHS, with its extensive expertise in database design, data linkage, and statistical analyses, and HRSA, with its subject matter expertise on FQHCs, involvement with implementation of health IT at these centers, and understanding of the unique challenges of the hard-to-reach populations who receive care at these safety net settings of care, are uniquely qualified to implement this project that will improve data capacity on patient-centered outcomes research on maternal health care provided at FQHCs.

The data file resulting from the work proposed in this project, as well as the developmental data linkage work, will enhance researchers’ ability to analyze data on maternal health care provided at these health centers and subsequently gain insight the relationships among the characteristics, care provided, and outcomes of these maternal health visits. Furthermore, exploration of linkage will determine feasibility of combining these data with additional sources to gain even further understanding of these relationships

PROJECT PURPOSE & GOALS

The purpose of this project is to address the following objectives:

  • Build upon FQHC patient visit clinical EHR data that will already be collected and processed by the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) in CY2021 by collecting and processing patient visit clinical EHR data for all visits to a larger sample of FQHCs in CY2022.

  • Produce a nationally representative data file composed of FQHC EHRs for all maternal health visits in CY2022 in sampled FQHCs. The file will include variables on patient characteristics, clinical care provided, and health outcomes.

  • Evaluate the linkage of CY2021 (and CY2022 if available) FQHC maternal health EHR data with the NDI and HUD administrative data through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Data Linkage Program.

  • Analyze data, give presentations, and publish report(s) demonstrating the use of the FQHC EHR data file including the examination of relationships among the characteristics, care provided, and outcomes of the maternal health visits. Of interest are the characteristics of visits maternal health visits related to care provided for COVID-19.