Healthy Hearts Northwest
Healthy Hearts Northwest (H2N) was one of seven regional cooperatives in AHRQ’s EvidenceNOW initiative, which was dedicated to helping small- and medium-sized primary care practices across the country use the latest evidence to improve the heart health of millions of Americans.
H2N's goal was to study strategies to build QI capacity with a focus on improving cardiovascular health of individual patients and populations.
More than 200 small primary care practices across Oregon representing 1,100 clinicians using 36 different electronic health records participated in H2N.
The project was a collaboration between the MacColl Center for Health Care Innovation, the Oregon Rural-based Practice Research Network, and Comagine Health.
- The EvidenceNOW Healthy Hearts Northwest (H2N) team created a "Toolkit for Clinical Quality Metric Extraction" to guide practice facilitators and primary care clinic staff in using health information technology (HIT) to support quality improvement (QI).
- To read more about H2N's findings, refer to "Building quality improvement capacity in primary care: 16 key insights about practice facilitation."
- Explore practice personas and the tailored strategies for approaching practices with specific issues.
In addition, H2N generated several publications, including:
- Study protocol for “Healthy Hearts Northwest”: a 2x2 randomized factorial trial to build quality improvement capacity in primary care
- Specifications of Clinic Quality Measures and Value Set Vocabularies Shift Over Time
- Engaging Primary Care Practices in Studies of Improvement: Did You Budget Enough for Practice Recruitment?
- Understanding the Impact of Variations in Measurement Period Reporting for Electronic Clinical Quality Measures
- Virtual Educational Outreach Intervention in Primary Care Based on the Principles of Academic Detailing