New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI)
From MAHealthIT
New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI)
Overview:
Founded in 2002, the New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) is a non-profit, independent health policy institute dedicated to transforming health care for the benefit of patients and their families. As a member-based organization, NEHI brings together diverse perspectives from the health care community across the country – including patients, payers, providers, universities, hospitals and not-for-profit institutions, and for-profit companies and associations – to find mutual solutions to mutual health care problems through collaboration, research, and transformation.
In order to improve health care, NEHI harnesses the collective commitment of its membership, conducts independent research projects, informs and educates policymakers and health care leaders nationally, and drives change by influencing health care policy and practice.
Current projects:
- Promoting the Benefits of Telemedicine - NEHI, with the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC), is assessing the potential of Tele-ICUs – a telemedicine technology that addresses the nationwide shortage of intensive care specialists – to reduce the mortality and length of hospital stay among ICU patients.
- Improving Patient Medication Adherence - Patient nonadherence to prescribed medications is a common and costly problem, negatively impacting patient health and quality of care. NEHI is working to identify and test promising strategies – including the use of information technology – to improve patient adherence to medications for the treatment of chronic disease.
- Redesigning Primary Care - A shortage of providers, combined with increased demand fueled by older, sicker patients, is creating a crisis in the U.S. primary care delivery system that is impacting the quality and cost of patient care. NEHI has examined the root causes of this crisis, with the goal of both identifying innovations that could enhance the quality and efficiency of primary care and recommending changes in the education of health professionals.
- Improving Patient Safety with CPOE - In partnership with MTC, NEHI produced groundbreaking research revealing that one in ten patients in a Massachusetts community hospital experiences a serious medication error, and that computerized physician order entry (CPOE) technology could significantly reduce those errors. Following the Massachusetts Legislature’s move to require CPOE at the state’s hospitals as a condition of licensure, prompted by the NEHI/MTC research, NEHI is now working with MTC to bring the safety benefits of CPOE to patients across the nation.
- Identifying and Supporting High-Value Innovations - Fast Adoption of Significant Technologies (FAST), a joint initiative of NEHI and MTC, identifies, evaluates and promotes the adoption of innovations that are underused despite their potential to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Through FAST, NEHI is currently working to promote underused telemedicine technologies with the potential to reduce the burden of chronic disease.
- Sustaining Innovation Through Comparative Effectiveness Research - In April 2009, NEHI released new research outlining the potential impact of the federal comparative effectiveness research program on innovation throughout the health care system. As a next step, NEHI is undertaking an initiative to examine the dissemination of CER studies, and how the effectiveness of the studies’ dissemination to providers and patients will determine the overall effectiveness of the federal CER program.
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