June 23, 2023

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – ������ Health continues to embrace the transformational potential of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, using Azure OpenAI Service to create a generative AI internal chatbot.

The first AI-powered app is a conversational bot hosted in a secure, governed internal environment. The bot will respond to questions specific to ������ Health and provide real-time recommendations or directions to help save time and provide more efficient, patient-focused care in administrative use cases.

There are many potential applications for such cutting-edge technology. ������ Health’s first priority is to streamline the administrative day-to-day work for its care team members. Instead of spending time searching through training libraries, which include hundreds of ‘how-to’ documents, ������ Health teammates will be able to ask questions to leverage the chatbot to quickly access reference materials and documents.

“This is just one example of an innovative way to use this technology so that teammates can spend more time with patients and less time in front of a computer,” said Dr. David McSwain, ������ Health’s Chief Medical Informatics Officer and a pediatric critical care physician at ������ Children’s Hospital.

This new tool is the latest example of ������ Health helping to lead the way nationally in using generative AI applications to improve the care team experience. ������ Health is among a select group of health systems nationwide��tools powered by Azure.

������ Health will begin the rollout of its internal chatbot tool in June with a small group of clinicians and administrators and is finalizing plans to offer the software more broadly to teammates later this year.

“We want to lead the nation in safely applying this technology to benefit our teams and our patients,” said Rachini Ahmadi-Moosavi, ������ Health’s Chief Analytics Officer. “By partnering with Microsoft to develop the required expertise and processes for ������ Health, we can reduce friction in certain areas of work for our teammates while ensuring all the information remains protected. This tool is just the first step towards leveraging the emerging AI technology to transform healthcare operations.”

The team anticipates identifying multiple other use cases during the testing and pilot program, and especially after broader release to teammates.

“Our patients and care teams remain at the center of what we call Carolina Care,” said��Brent Lamm, ������ Health’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer.��“But by using this technology carefully and safely,
we believe we can help improve the way healthcare is provided throughout North Carolina and across the country.”

David Rhew, M.D., Global Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Worldwide Healthcare at Microsoft added, “Through the responsible integration of Azure OpenAI Service and other advanced technologies, our collaboration with ������ Health seeks to improve the health and wellbeing of North Carolinians and others whom ������ Health serves.”

About ������ Health

is a state entity and an affiliated enterprise of the University of North Carolina system, comprised of��, 19 hospital campuses and more than 900 clinics along with the clinical patient care programs of
the ������ (SOM).

It exists to improve the health and well-being of North Carolinians and others we serve and to further the teaching mission of the University of North Carolina SOM. ������ Health provided more than $141 million in Charity Care in
fiscal year 2022, and more than $522 million over the last five years. Our hospitals have received numerous awards and recognition for quality care, patient safety and the overall patient experience. For more information, please visit��.

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded a $3.73 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences for a five-year project to establish the Center for Virtual Care Value and Equity (ViVE).

The project is led by��, associate professor and Beerstecher-Blackwell Distinguished Term Scholar in the ������ School of Nursing. Khairat is a leader in the field of virtual care whose national and international projects have enhanced health care services and research, specifically within the digital health world.

“This groundbreaking initiative is pivotal for health care innovation and demonstrates Carolina’s leadership in virtual care research,” says Khairat, associate director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program and director of the Carolina Applied Informatics Research Lab. “The Center for ViVE will foster expertise in virtual care data and create workforce development opportunities with its partners throughout North Carolina and the nation.”

Virtual care — the use of online services, remote monitoring, and text-based messaging to deliver health care services remotely — has increased in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are still many challenges to adopting and sustaining this method of care and more research is needed to create feasible and sustainable virtual care systems. With this funding, Khairat and co-investigators will create the foundation needed to support the advancement of translational research in this field.

“We are very fortunate to have such an amazing community at Carolina and throughout the region to support this work,” says ViVE co-investigator and ������ Health Chief Medical Informatics Officer��. “With world-class information resources, incredible clinicians, and leadership across the institution dedicated to supporting health and well-being for all, this collaborative effort can truly change the landscape of virtual care development not only in North Carolina, but around the world.”

ViVE will build a repository of real-world virtual care data not previously available to researchers. The center will also develop frameworks to guide investigators through the design, implementation, and evaluation of virtual care research, offering training and support throughout the process.

������’������will support ViVE in drawing expertise from collaborators across Carolina and ������ Health, as well as virtual care and telehealth researchers from RTI International, the American Heart Association, American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics.

“This award is a recognition of the special expertise of our institution and the central role that Dr. Khairat and members of his terrific team have played in furthering our understanding of this powerful resource in health care” says��Nicholas Shaheen, co-director of NC TraCS and chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the ������. “We expect this group to advance the availability of quality health care beyond the walls of the clinic, especially to those traditionally underserved by American medicine.”

While telehealth services have made health care more convenient to some groups, certain populations remain underserved due to lack of access to technology and financial instability. The challenge of promoting health equity in virtual care is often overlooked due to the complex issues involved in implementing virtual care, such as patient privacy, reimbursement models, new workflows, and technology adoption.

ViVE’s library of real-world data coupled with implementation and evaluation frameworks will accelerate equity research in virtual care. ViVE will also leverage partnerships across the broader����(CTSA) Program network by producing resources and information that will fill that critical gap in health access and equity. The network will help disseminate and promote ViVE tools, educational resources, and training events.

“During the pandemic, we all realized virtual care’s importance,” says��Spencer Dorn, ViVE co-investigator and professor of medicine in the ������. “The newly funded center will help us determine how to harness virtual care to benefit all populations. This is core to our mission as the nation’s oldest public university.”

The center will provide opportunities for investigators and students at ������-Chapel Hill who are interested in virtual care research to request data, consult with experts, and attend education and training events. Work to establish the Center for ViVE began on August 1, 2023, and will continue for the next five years.

Originally posted at��

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Instead of spending time searching through training libraries, ������ Health team members can quickly access references that streamline their administrative burdens by leveraging OpenAI services on Microsoft Azure.

By Fox June��26, 2023

������ Health, participating in Epic’s generative artificial intelligence program that utilizes Microsoft Azure, will begin rolling out its internal chatbot tool with a small group of clinicians and administrators. It plans to offer the tool more broadly later this year.

WHY IT MATTERS

The Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based health system announced its first AI-powered app is a conversational bot that works like Chat GPT in a secure, governed internal environment.

“By using this technology carefully and safely, we believe we can help improve the way healthcare is provided throughout North Carolina and across the country,” said Brent Lamm, ������ Health’s SVP and CIO, in a statement.

The team anticipates identifying multiple other use cases as the tool is implemented across its network of 15 hospitals, 19 healthcare campuses and 900 clinics beginning later this year, according to the health system’s announcement.

“This is just one example of an innovative way to use this technology so that teammates can spend more time with patients and less time in front of a computer,” added Dr. David McSwain, ������ Health’s chief medical informatics officer and a pediatric critical care physician at ������ Children’s Hospital.

THE LARGER TREND

Electronic health record vendors – Epic and eClinicalWorks – announced their��.

While the EHR vendors are developing a number of automated software programs that use��large language models and predictive models, they are focused on how their customers will use the tools.

On the showroom floor in April, Epic representatives said that because there are a lot of unknowns with LLMs, the company is focused on tool accuracy and working directly with customers to ensure their users understand what they are working with.

“We are developing additional ways to incorporate generative AI across our applications, from ambulatory to inpatient to [customer relationship management] to revenue cycle,” said Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development for Epic.

Like Epic, Salesforce integrated GPT into its HIPAA-compliant environment to summarize care team conversations. eClinicalWorks also added GPT tools in its EHR to cut a number of administrative steps.

While caution is warranted,��, according to Manny Krakaris, CEO of Augmedix, which uses natural language processing in its automation platform.

LLMs are “very accurate in responding to specific prompts or questions,” he told��Healthcare IT News��in April.

“They’re also broadly applicable, so they can cover a wide range of subjects.”

ON THE RECORD

“We want to lead the nation in safely applying this technology to benefit our teams and our patients,” said Rachini Ahmadi-Moosavi, ������ Health’s chief analytics officer, in a statement.

“By partnering with Microsoft to develop the required expertise and processes for ������ Health, we can reduce friction in certain areas of work for our teammates while ensuring all the information remains protected. This tool is just the first step toward leveraging the emerging AI technology to transform healthcare operations.”

“Through the responsible integration of Azure OpenAI Service and other advanced technologies, our collaboration with ������ Health seeks to improve the health and wellbeing of North Carolinians and others whom ������ Health Serves,” added Dr. David Rhew, global chief medical officer and vice president of worldwide healthcare at Microsoft.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
����������:��afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

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A Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Approach to Identification of Incidental Radiology Findings in Trauma Patients Discharged from the Emergency Department

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Brent Lamm’s work is at the center of a recent artificial intelligence explosion in healthcare, and he has a lot of first-hand knowledge and advice to share with his peers.

By June 05, 2023

Brent Lamm is CIO at ������ Health, based in Morrisville, North Carolina. He has quite the seat for the artificial intelligence explosion in healthcare – he’s sitting right in the middle of it.

Lamm and peers at Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California at San Diego are part of a pilot project by electronic health records giant Epic, testing Epic’s large language model AI capabilities to enhance the provider experience.

Lamm also is in the midst of some exciting work with Microsoft in the AI space, leveraging����(the kind behind groundbreaking applications like ChatGPT) on a broad range of use cases to assist clinicians and other team members.

Healthcare IT News��sat down with Lamm to discuss these projects and his feelings on AI in healthcare as it grows faster than some might like.

Q. You are working with Epic, along with Stanford, the University of Wisconsin and UC San Diego, to pilot its large language model AI capabilities to enhance the provider experience. What is the goal of this project?

A.��Our ultimate goals are to reduce clinician burnout and enhance the patient-provider relationship through the use of this new technology that assists with drafting responses to patient communications.

Over the past decade, the implementation and adoption of digital solutions that enable patients to communicate with their care teams more easily between visits have brought tremendous benefits in terms of experience and engagement.

However, a side effect has been an increased workload for clinicians, which has contributed to the current industrywide challenges for care team members in maintaining a healthy personal well-being. This situation only worsened with the pandemic, as the use of digital communication by patients has increased.

We believe the����is working to develop can play a huge role in helping address these challenges by reducing the cognitive burden of drafting responses. This is similar to how spreadsheet technologies have helped business users dramatically reduce the burden of performing basic calculations for decades, allowing them to spend their time and energy focused on the core essence of the given problem or opportunity.

By offloading the task of crafting a draft communication, the clinician will be able to better focus on the patient and their needs. The positive side effect of this more efficient process should also be an improvement in the patients’ experience and their overall relationship with their care team.

Being an early adopter of generative AI embedded into our Epic EHR allows our team to help drive this necessary transformation faster, while also building trust from our care teams that our providers helped make the end product more effective.

We hope this initial pilot project will be the first of many Epic AI pilots that our team supports. We are excited about the potential benefits and efficiency that AI can offer all our care team members and our administrative Epic users.

Q. More specifically, what will you and your team be doing with the LLM AI in-house to make the EHR experience better for providers? And how will you be getting your providers to understand the AI technology?

A.��Our initial work will expose this new capability to approximately 10 of our physicians to safely test this new functionality in a highly controlled environment. We have assembled a team of physicians from various specialties, including primary care, to be part of this initial effort.

Their focus will be to evaluate the usability of the new functionality, particularly the accuracy of the communications drafted by the generative AI.

One key metric we will be examining is how effectively this new technology reduces the time it takes for providers to finalize their communications. The amount of editing required will serve as an important measure of success. Our ultimate goal is to assist Epic in enhancing the technology to the point where only minimal edits are necessary.

Another significant aspect of this work involves evaluating provider satisfaction regarding the tone and style of the draft messages. It is crucial that the generated content aligns with their expectations and preferred mode of communication with patients. We find this aspect of the work particularly promising from a technological and informatics standpoint.

Furthermore, our team is enthusiastic about evaluating and contributing to the development of generative AI with regard to specialty-specific differences and nuances. Our aim is to guarantee that the potential of this technology is accessible and effective for all of our clinicians.

Q. What will you be cautioning your providers about LLM AI? There’s a lot of concern surrounding AI.

A.��We are very pleased to see Epic adopting a thoughtful and cautious approach in implementing this technology. One crucial aspect of our work is to properly train and educate the participating providers about this functionality.

The primary caution is to ensure a proper and thorough review of the drafted message prior to hitting send. We know the current state of generative AI is far from perfect and can generate text that is inaccurate or may contain bias, which is commonly referred to as a hallucination.

That issue will improve over time as the AI learns, but users must validate automatically generated drafts carefully. Our intention is to ensure that everyone clearly understands this technology is merely a tool to aid in drafting the initial message, with the providers retaining full control of the final response.

In parallel with this effort, we have launched a formal program with leaders from across our organization to develop and implement ������ Health’s Responsible AI Framework. A committee of multi-disciplinary leaders and clinicians will use this framework to evaluate vendor-developed and homegrown technology solutions that use various forms of AI.

The areas of consideration under the framework are fairness, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness.

Looking ahead, as AI technology continues to advance, we firmly believe maintaining the perspective of AI as “augmented intelligence” is vital and should remain a core principle. Machine learning, large language models and other forms of AI have the potential to revolutionize healthcare for the better, but they should be used as tools to support our greatest asset: our people.

Q. On another front, you’re working with Microsoft on an AI project. Please elaborate about this project and its goals.

A. Yes, we are excited to be working closely with Microsoft to leverage generative AI on a broader range of use cases to assist our clinicians and other team members. Much of this is still very early stage, but we already have a fully functional prototype of an internal general purpose chatbot, similar to the consumer facing ChatGPT application.

We believe that a local, enterprise solution like this has the potential to unlock the productivity and efficiency gains that generative AI chatbots can offer, while maintaining safety, security and privacy for our users.

One of the first scenarios we are focusing on in leveraging this capability is to assist our care teams in accessing training and education resources more quickly and easily. Frontline care team members frequently reference these materials as protocols and workflows change, and we believe chatbot-style search can offer a far more efficient method for our users to quickly find the specific information they need to best navigate the technology and shift focus back to their patients.

Q. What would you say to your CIO peers at other healthcare provider organizations about working with AI today?

A.��First and foremost, we must keep the patient and our care team members at the very heart of this work as it advances. The emerging technology has such tremendous potential to help improve health outcomes, reduce clinician burnout, and bend the cost curve across healthcare.

However, we must not lose sight of our mission to improve the health and wellness of the patients and communities that we serve.

While it may sound paradoxical, I would strongly encourage leaders across the industry to aggressively pursue use of this technology but do so in a very careful and thoughtful manner. I also believe finding proven partners who share our values related to patient-centered care and protecting data and privacy is critically important.

Given the nature of this technology and the significant resources required to make it work, I expect most organizations will need to align with strategic partners. Ensuring alignment of values is just as important, if not more so, than alignment of technology and architecture.

I look forward to seeing how our peer colleagues and organizations embrace and drive improved outcomes with AI. If we do this right, the possibilities are truly amazing.

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We are excited to welcome two new fellows to the Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program! Adrian Romero, MD and Joseph Thomas, MD, MBA will participate in the 2023-2025 fellowship class!

Adrian Romero, MD is an emergency medicine (EM) physician interested in using the experience he gains through clinical experience in a level 1 trauma center like ������ Health, combined with private practice to improve workflow for emergency medicine physicians.�� Dr. Romero is interested in studying and applying technology to alleviate the cognitive demand of emergency physicians on tasks that are not related to direct patient care.

Joseph Thomas, MD MBA is an Internal Medicine physician practicing as a hospitalist at ������ Health who is interested in improving clinical decision support systems that will increase workflow and process optimization.�� Through his career, Dr. Thomas became interested in clinical informatics while at Rush University which lead him to complete his MBA and become focus on lean healthcare. He has spent a great deal of time helping to improve workflows and implementing his lean medicine principles within his group.

Welcome to the team!

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Michael Kane, MD was elected to the national specialty steering board for a 2 year term.����Specialty Steering Boards provide a network for specialists across organizations to define the gold standard for Epic workflows and content in their area. Each Specialty Steering Board consists of 12 members who have been nominated and elected by their peers.

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Clinical informatics became formally recognized as a medical subspecialty in 2011 with its first diplomates granted in 2013. Physician informaticians collaborate with health and information technology professionals to analyze, design, implement, and evaluate information and communications systems that enhance individual and population health outcomes, improve equitable and patient-centered care and patient safety, and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship. Drs. Arlene Chung (Internal Medicine and Pediatrics), Donald Spencer (Family Medicine), and Carlton Moore (Internal Medicine) were among the first in the nation to become certified in the new specialty.

Physicians, who are board-eligible or certified in their primary medical specialty (i.e., internal medicine specialties, pediatric specialties, family medicine, emergency medicine, etc.), can become certified in the medical subspecialty of Clinical Informatics through the American Board of Preventative Medicine through the completion of the two-year ACGME-accredited fellowship program.

The ������ Hospitals Clinical Informatics Subspecialty Fellowship Program will be accepting two fellows each application cycle. Each fellow serves as an Assistant Lead Informatics Physician at ������ Health, and are embedded within the award-winning, internationally renowned Information Services Division (ISD) while maintaining an active clinical practice in their primary medical specialty as a Clinical Instructor in the ������. Applications will be accepted via ERAS beginning July 5^th for a start date of July 1, 2022.

Arlene E. Chung, MD, MHA, MMCi, FAMIA, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, serves as the founding fellowship director and led the program through initial accreditation with commendation from the ACGME. Dr. Chung also serves as the Associate Director of the Program on Health & Clinical Informatics at the ������, the Medical Informatics Director of Digital Health Innovation and Patient Engagement for ������ Health, and Medical Director of Population Health Informatics at ������ Health Alliance.

Program leadership also includes Associate Program Directors: Drs. Donald Spencer, Carlton Moore, and Kimberly Shoenbill. Dr. Carl Seashore (Pediatrics) and Drs. Spencer, Moore, Shoenbill, and Chung are core faculty for the program. For additional information about the program, contact Dr. Chung at cifellowship@med.unc.edu.

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Clinical Informatics fellow Chris Evans, MD was awarded a NC TraCS pilot grant to support his research in the development of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) approach to identification of incidental radiology findings among discharged ED patients.

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November 4, 2020

Timely and easy access to healthcare data, including diagnostic images, can improve patient outcomes and care coordination.

Recognizing the importance of systemwide access to diagnostic images, Chapel Hill, NC-based ������ Health established a coordinated enterprise imaging strategy. In an October 27 webinar, sponsored by Hyland Healthcare and hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review, two leaders from ������ Health described their strategy and shared benefits of implementing an enterprise imaging strategy with a vendor neutral archive – or VNA – as its main solution. They were joined by an expert from Vidagos, a consulting firm that helps organizations on their enterprise imaging journey.

The panelists were:

• Jeff Agricola, Enterprise Clinical Imaging IT Manager, ������ Health
• Brad Cook, HCS, Applications Developer, ������ Health
• Cheryl Petersilge, MD, Founder and CEO, Vidagos

To learn more about ������ Health’s journey to enterprise imaging, view the full article on the Becker’s Healthcare website .

About Becker’s Healthcare

Becker’s Healthcare strives to improve healthcare by equipping decision-makers with the insights they need to make informed decisions. We strategically align editorial content and live events to best meet the unique needs of our readers. Content is informed by leaders and decision-makers in the industry, including those who serve on the Becker’s Healthcare advisory board. All news, analysis, events and other content is packaged in way that acknowledges the value of our readers’ time and recognizes the pace of change in healthcare. We find new ways for our advertising partners to connect with our influential audience, knowing that their support ensures Becker’s content and live events are accessible to all healthcare leaders across the U.S.

For more information, please visit .

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Sam Cykert, MD

October 29, 2020

������-Chapel Hill researchers and collaborators including the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) Program and Community Care of North Carolina created a digital intervention using electronic health records to rank 437,556 North Carolinians at 219 primary care clinics according to cardiovascular health metrics and then help practices immediately intervene to reduce risk of heart attacks, stroke, and death among those at greatest risk.

The results, published in��, show that practices were able to reduce the percent of patients at a high 10-year risk of serious cardiovascular events from 23 percent to 17 percent – a relative reduction of 25 percent of patients. After adjusting for clinical-patient efforts outside this intervention, the 25 percent reduction is essentially equivalent to preventing 6,000 patients from suffering a heart attack or stroke, or dying due to cardiovascular disease within 10 years.

Senior author of the��HSR��paper Sam Cykert, MD, professor of medicine and member of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, led this data-driven intervention, which included mobilizing practice facilitators from the North Carolina AHEC Practice Support team to partner with individual clinics and help providers put in place procedures to proactively bring in high risk patients to reduce cardiovascular risk as quickly as possible.

All electronic health records systems have the capabilities to stratify patient populations, according to a given metric, such as cardiovascular risk, Cykert said. These capabilities are possible with digital systems, but they are not automatic or easy to use; they take extra time and know how clinics don’t usually have, and it can be expensive to do the necessary programming.

“Rural primary care clinics make less money than anyone in medicine,” Cykert said. “They are really doing God’s work. Yet no one provides resources to take the pressure off these clinics so they can truly do the best they can. Right now,��everything��is on their backs.”

Cykert and colleagues were able to help clinics thanks to a $15-million federal grant��from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Evidence NOW Program. The goal was to use the latest evidence to improve the heart health of millions of Americans. ������’s Heart Health Now! Advancing Heart Health in NC Primary Care project was one of seven grantees back in 2015.

The first����from this program were reported in 2018, showing it was possible to build a dashboard of patients in need of risk reduction, based on their cholesterol numbers and other risk factors even if clinics lacked cholesterol data.

In the current paper, Cykert and colleagues report that using health records coupled with mobilizing practice facilitators, or coaches, could immediately reduce cardiovascular risk based on addressing four metrics: hypertension control, aspirin use, smoking interventions, and statin use.

“The first intervention is to build the stratified risk database,” Cykert said. “Then our quality improvement coaches worked with clinics to understand the data and build a system so they could use it. If a clinic has 100 patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease, what’s the best way for a clinic to engage and reengage with patients to reduce risk as quickly as possible?”

Of the more than 400,000 patients age 40-79 at the 219 clinics, about 147,000 were identified as being at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease, suffering a stroke, having a heart attack or dying. With the help of coaches, clinics were able to quickly reduce the degree of risk from 23 percent to 17 percent. This 6 percent reduction was the equivalent of preventing about 9,000 adverse events related to cardiovascular health. When factoring in the steps clinics took to reduce risk aside from this intervention, Cykert said his team’s analysis showed the actual reduction due to the intervention was 4 percent, the equivalent of 6,000 adverse health events, such as strokes.

About 50 percent of the 219 clinics were in largely eastern North Carolina, known as the stroke belt. “During our intervention, these practices did as well as more sophisticated practices in more urban settings,” Cykert said.

This kind of approach, according to Cykert, could extend beyond cardiovascular health. Such support could help practices with patients in need of social services support, COVID-19 prevention and testing, telehealth needs, life style and health education interventions, and prevention methods to avoid chronic illnesses.

“Think of how good we could be at helping those in most need if we took a holistic population health approach like this, instead of only focusing on medical issues,” Cykert said. “Think of what we could accomplish if we took on alcohol and opioid abuse.”

Alcohol use is up 40 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly due to people who had not been drinking alcohol previously or very little. And regardless of the pandemic, alcohol-related deaths are the third biggest cause of preventable death in the United States. Dan Jonas, MD, MPH, professor at the ������ and member of the ������ Sheps Center, started a project to use the same intervention techniques to help primary practices reduce risky drinking while Cykert is working on the opiate problem in several rural counties.

To create such a data-driven, boots on the ground approach across the entire state or nation, Cykert said state governments could invest in building health extension centers, similar to agriculture extension centers that help farmers.

“These would be physical places in every region so that multiple small practices could share the same services, the same quality improvement coaches, the same kind of help we need to improve the lives of thousands or even millions of people.”

In addition to Cykert, other authors of the paper are Thomas C. Keyserling, MD, MPH, professor at the ������ and member of the ������ Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention; Michael Pignone, MD, MPH,��Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine and professor of Medicine at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin; Darren DeWalt, MD, MPH,��Chief of the Division of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology, the John R. and Helen B. Chambliss Distinguished Professor at the ������, and member of the ������ Sheps Center; Bryan J. Weiner, PhD, professor of global health and health services at the University of Washington; Justin G. Trogdon, PhD, professor of health policy and management at the ������ Gillings School of Global Public Health; Thomas Wroth, MD, President of Community Care of North Carolina; Jacqueline Halladay, MD, MPH,��professor at the ������ Department of Family Medicine, Chair for Research at ������ Health Sciences at MAHEC, and member of the ������ Sheps Center; Monique Mackey, MLS, quality improvement manager for NC AHEC; Jason Fine, ScD, professor of biostatistics at ������ Gillings; Jung In Kim, PhD, assistant research professor of statistics at Penn State University; and Crystal��Cené, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at ������, member of the ������ Sheps Center, and Executive Director for Health Equity at ������ Health.

Media contact:��Mark Derewicz, (919) 923-0959

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������ Health has earned 2020 College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Digital Health Most Wired recognition as a Certified Level 9 organization, earning a Performance Excellence award.

������ Health is one of only��three health care systems in North Carolina to achieve Level 9 this year! Please join us in thanking and congratulating our ISD team for this national recognition!

The CHIME Digital Health Most Wired program conducts an annual survey to assess how effectively healthcare organizations apply core and advanced technologies into their clinical and business programs to improve health and care in their communities.

“We are excited to be recognized for the phenomenal efforts and achievements our teams have led, supporting ������ Health’s digital health transformation, and most importantly improving the experience, access, and engagement for our patients.�� CHIME is a world-class organization, and we are thrilled to be part of this very distinguished cohort of health care organizations,” said Tracy Parham, Chief Information Officer at ������ Health.

“Digital technology has been a driver of innovation in healthcare for many years now, but never to the degree that we saw in 2020 with the pandemic,” said CHIME President and CEO Russell P. Branzell. “The Digital Health Most Wired program underscores why healthcare organizations keep pushing themselves to be digital leaders and shows what amazing feats they can achieve. This certification recognizes their exemplary performance in 2020.”

A total of 29,135 organizations were represented in the 2020 Digital Health Most Wired program, which this year included four separate surveys: domestic, ambulatory, long-term care and international. The surveys assessed the adoption, integration and impact of technologies in healthcare organizations at all stages of development, from early development to industry leading.

Each participating organization received a customized benchmarking report, an overall score and scores for individual levels in eight segments: infrastructure; security; business/disaster recovery; administrative/supply chain; analytics/data management; interoperability/population health; patient engagement; and clinical quality/safety. Participants can use the report and scores to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. Participants also received certification based on their overall performance, with level 10 being the highest.

Media Contact: Alan Wolf, (919) 218-7103, alan.wolf@unchealth.unc.edu

About ������ Health Care

������ Health Care is an integrated health care system owned by the state of North Carolina and based in Chapel Hill. It exists to further the teaching mission of the University of North Carolina and to provide state-of-the-art patient care.

������ Health Care is comprised of at Chapel Hill, ranked consistently among the best medical centers in the country; the , a nationally eminent research institution; in Hendersonville; in Siler City; in Clayton and Smithfield; in Kinston; in Goldsboro; ��in Lenoir; in Rocky Mount; in Eden, in Jacksonville, and its provider network in Wake County; and the .

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