Empowering Nurses with Advanced Technology
Beth Halley
January 2012
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MITRE's Beth Halley was on Capitol Hill this fall where she participated in the Congressional Nursing Caucus Panel. |
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Beth Halley began her nursing career as an intern at Duke University Hospital. What she didn't know was that the experience would introduce her to a healthcare transformation she would spend much of her 30-year career working to advance.
"Duke had terminals at the nursing stations, and we could pull up patients' lab results as soon as the tests were completed," Halley recalls. "This was a novel idea at that time. Anybody, anywhere in the hospital, with proper privileges, could access patients' clinical information and diagnostic results. Before we had computers, it could take hours to get hard copies of these results."
Today, Halley is a healthcare adviser in MITRE's Center for Transforming Health. In this role, she supports the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration by leading a critical project to develop a portfolio of electronic clinical quality measures. ONC works with other federal agencies and the private sector to promote the adoption of technology to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. (See "What Is 'Meaningful Use' in Healthcare?" below.)
In a related effort, Halley recently served as co-chair of the Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform (TIGER) Initiative's Standards and Interoperability Collaborative. Its goal is to integrate industry standards for health IT interoperability with clinical standards for practice and education.
TIGER has since evolved into a not-for-profit foundation, and Halley sits on its board. She describes the foundation as "a grassroots effort within nursing, driven by the realization that technology would become a significant part of patient care." As part of her work with the group, she also authored a chapter on standards and interoperability in the recently published book, Nursing Informatics: Where Technology and Caring Meet.
A High-Profile Role with Federal Agencies
Earlier, MITRE tapped Halley to lead our work with the ONC on its Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) program.
The CHI program was a collaborative effort among 20 federal departments and agencies aimed at adopting health information interoperability standards in federal government systems. Halley collaborated on EHR standards adoption with officials from several federal agencies. In addition, she led the effort to ensure the federal government position was represented across standards organizations.
"My work involved testifying on health information standards, researching standards adoption and other projects related to clinical health information, and building consensus," she explains. She often speaks publicly on the role of standards, interoperability, and EHRs in improving patient care.
A Career in Patient Care and Technology
Halley says that MITRE has provided the ideal platform for exploring her interest in the intersection between patient care and emerging technologies.
"My career has combined patient care, the health of the population, and technology," says Halley, who has been at MITRE for eight years. "Health IT is ultimately a systems engineering problem, and MITRE is well positioned to address these challenges at the national level. Specifically, it's our expertise in standards development, distributed queries, security and privacy—along with our experience working with federal agencies—that's crucial to our success in this area."
Halley, a registered nurse who also has an MBA, is currently serving her second year as chair of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Nursing Informatics Committee. The committee provides policy and educational guidance to its 3,000 nursing members on their role in the use of technology to improve patient care. In addition, Halley was recently appointed to the board of directors of INOVA Loudoun Healthcare, Inc.
Having an Impact
In her spare time, Halley volunteers as a nurse at the Loudoun Free Clinic, which serves uninsured residents in Loudoun County, Va. She also volunteers with a national disabled veterans' organization and has been active with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic. "You always get more from volunteering than you give," she notes.
Halley says her role at MITRE, as well as her related work with HIMSS and the TIGER Initiative Foundation, gives her insights into the technologies that will change how nurses and doctors interact with patients, helping them provide a higher level of care.
"What I like about my job is having the chance to work on new technologies that will have a positive impact on the quality of healthcare in the future," she says. "MITRE is involved in all these areas. It's an exciting time to be in health IT and to connect with the federal agencies driving the changes. I've also been very lucky to work with exceptional people."
What Is "Meaningful Use" in Healthcare?
"The goal of adopting new technologies such as electronic health records is not just to acquire new systems and put them into a hospital environment, but to use these systems as effectively as possible to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare," Halley explains. "Through electronic clinical quality measures, hospitals and healthcare providers can capture data to illustrate the impact such healthcare technology systems have on healthcare quality."
By using this data, providers achieve what's known in the healthcare community as "meaningful use" of the technology, Halley adds. For example, providers are required to record when patients report that they smoke—and the systems then prompt doctors to recommend smoking cessation programs, she explains. The systems then calculate the number of patients a doctor has examined, illustrate how many were asked about tobacco use, and show how many were referred to such programs. "By capturing and evaluating this information, the systems give doctors concrete ways to improve the quality of care," Halley says.
"Experts from all over the country are developing these clinical quality measures in a very rigorous process," she adds. "These measures are being incorporated into electronic health records, or EHRs. What I work on is the technical specifications that allow an EHR to perform this analysis, and this is all part of meaningful use. Our charge at MITRE is to create a portfolio of behavioral health clinical quality measures that are EHR-supported." |
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—by Maria S. Lee
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