CASE STUDYWESTMED Medical Group Improves Care of Patients with Cardiovascular Disease Risk Using Azuqua

Azuqua Client

WESTMED Medical Group

Overview

In 2013, the American Heart Association published new guidelines for calculating the risk of heart disease or stroke and recommended that all individuals between the ages of 40-79 be assessed on a regular basis. However, adoption of this new guideline is sporadic throughout the industry because modifying existing practitioner workflows to incorporate a new process is a challenge.

WESTMED found that only a small number of patients had the recommended atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk score documented in their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) chart.

Calculating the risk score required a series of onerous, manual steps. The algorithm was complicated. Therefore, doctors needed to find an external website that provided an ASCVD risk calculator, copy/paste in several data points from the patient’s record, and then enter the final result back into the patient’s EMR.

“Azuqua has given us the ability to provide innovative technical solutions to our clinical teams while extending the functionalities of our current EMR.”

-- William Saint-Louis,Director of Information Systems

“Connectivity and APIs are just starting to take off in healthcare. It’s great to be able to customize our EMR in this way. This solution may not have been possible without Azuqua.”

-- Anne Garrity, RN-Clinical Process Project Manager

Azuqua Automates Risk Evaluation

Just as the checklist dramatically improved outcomes across the medical industry, Azuqua is automating processes for WESTMED so that doctors can more effectively focus on diagnosis and treatment rather than precisely following a long set of steps for each patient.

The WESTMED IT team created a custom connector within Azuqua to the group’s EMR system and created a new microservice that contained the risk factor calculation algorithm. Then the IT team worked together with clinical care staff to automate the workflow that the doctors needed. Once each relevant field within a patient’s record was completed, the doctor simply had to click a button and the data would flow directly into the calculator microservice via Azuqua. Azuqua then returns the risk factor in the patient’s record.

Doctors no longer have to independently calculate the risk factor since the EMR is able to retrieve the score and recommendations for him/her, and he/she can now spend more of the visit interacting with the patient. Additionally, the organization can easily and accurately assess compliance rates with AHA guidelines and better map the implementation of these practices to patient outcomes in the future.

The Future: Automated Treatment Suggestions

In addition to calculating the ASCVD risk score, the AHA also recommended a new set of treatment options for patients under different scenarios. WESTMED is currently working on developing a set of applications for doctors that will guide them through these new treatment recommendations.

About WESTMED

WESTMED Medical Group, based in Purchase, NY, is an award-winning, large multi-specialty group medical practice. It is staffed by a team of over 350 physicians dedicated to providing coordinated, efficient and the highest quality of patient care at its 14 locations in Westchester County, NY and Fairfield County, CT. WESTMED is nationally recognized and known for being a high-performing health system, providing a one-stop-shopping medical experience for patients, and for measuring the effectiveness of its healthcare. WESTMED has New York medical offices in White Plains, Rye, Yonkers, Purchase, Scarsdale and New Rochelle, with Connecticut offices in Greenwich, Darien and Stamford.