Gov. Kaine praises Centra heart program

A Centra Health pilot project with electronic medical records could improve cardiac patients’ care and become a national model for gathering data that can lead to better methods of treating heart problems.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine visited Lynchburg General Hospital on Monday to highlight Centra’s innovations with data collection, which earned it a $150,000 state grant this year.
Kaine said he hoped the grant would help Centra’s cardiology practice “to pioneer a model that other hospitals and practices around the country will follow.”
The grant will help Centra gather data from community clinics and physician practices, in addition to hospitals. Barriers prevented such data gathering in the past, because of differences in computer systems and definitions of medical terms used in each hospital’s record systems.
“I am a fanatic about measurements,” Kaine said, comparing the medical-records project’s goal of measuring results of medical care with the ways he checks up on state government’s performance.
“I don’t think you can improve without measurements,” Kaine said.
The grant focuses on the difference between a doctor looking at a patient’s paper records to decide a course of care, compared with looking at how thousands of patients have fared in similar situations and choosing a treatment that worked best in those cases.
Dr. John Brush of Norfolk, representing Virginia as a member of the American College of Cardiology, said the college has assembled four databases that include the records of 7 million cardiology patients.
The Virginia grant will focus on developing the newest of those databases, which seeks to collect data from clinics and physicians who provide follow-up care after cardiac patients are discharged from a hospital.
The intended result will be an automated data mining collection and filing tool. The data-retrieval system will connect to the American College of Cardiology’s database that offers best-practices information about outpatient heart care.
Centra will become one of the first hospitals in the country to track both in-patient and outpatient cases as part of the national database.
“Reliable, evidence-based medicine has become a goal of modern-day medicine,” Brush said, “but defining standards is not enough to achieve high-quality care. 
“Practitioners need a mechanism to close the loop to assure that they’re
adhering to those standards. This step involves measurement and feedback, which is costly to hospitals and practices,” Brush said.
The grant will help make it easier to collect the measures and feedback, Brush said.
Kaine said Centra received the grant partly through the efforts of Del. Shannon Valentine, D-Lynchburg.  Valentine said she succeeded in persuading Aneesh Chopra, Kaine’s secretary of technology, to take a look at Centra’s program.
“The Centra grant really began because of Del. Valentine, who saw we were giving these grants and said to Aneesh, ‘Look, we’re doing some really wonderful things here at Centra that you need to know about.’
“So Centra would not have been one of the grant recipients, even though you merited it, but it took somebody to get it through the door,” Kaine said.
Kaine added that the fact that Del. Valentine’s husband, Mike Valentine, is a cardiologist at Centra “might have had some influence on her passion around Centra. But Centra made it because of the merits,” Kaine said.
Kaine also praised the legislative efforts of Del. Kathy Byron, R-Campbell County, who helped win passage of bills that concentrated Virginia’s workforce training programs in the community college system.
When he took office, Kaine said, state government had 20 agencies handling parts of workforce development, and they answered to four different parts of his Cabinet.
“That meant I couldn’t grab anybody and shake them and say ‘do a better job,’” Kaine said. Byron was among a group of legislators who wanted to streamline the state’s job training effort, he said.
Kaine said he mentioned workforce issues because, during a tour of Centra’s departments Monday, he met several medical workers who were also students at Central Virginia Community College.
“I mention that because CVCC has done a remarkable job in training health care professionals,” Kaine said.