The Harlem Family Institute

Year 2021-present

Title Electronic Health Records Strategy and Implementation Plan

Organization The Harlem Family Institute

Project Type Organizational Project

Role Project Manager

Skills used Project management, data analysis (Excel, R), PowerPoint, Zoom, Google Forms

URL https://harlemfamilyinstitute.org

Stage In-progress

Description

Since September 2021, I have been working part-time with a small psychoanalytic training institute to integrate an electronic health record (EHR) system adopted earlier in the year into its existing systems and workflows. The organization is mostly run through volunteer efforts of experienced psychoanalysts, many of whom are not familiar with electronic documentation requirements. It primarily provides psychoanalysis to children in Harlem and Washington Heights.

Most psychoanalysts practice in private settings, often fully out of insurance networks. Many analysts have medical or mental health professional backgrounds, but in New York State, it is possible to become a psychoanalyst with a Master's degree in any field, through a five-year training at an Institute. Many of the candidates at the institute come from clergy backgrounds and have not been exposed to current standards of EHR practice in medical and behavioral health settings. Candidates primarily work with children, with a particular focus on working with patients from historically underrepresented backgrounds in psychoanalysis.

In my role, I oversee an ongoing review of the EHR’s use and co-administer the database. I provide individualized training to psychoanalytic candidates and supervisors in electronic health record fundamentals and agency protocols including HIPAA compliance and cybersecurity. I am also collaboratively drafting recommendations for EHR protocols and standards with institute leadership. I help the Institute's leadership develop a strategy to integrate revenue-generation into EHR system for low-fee psychotherapy. I participate in the organizational Systems Committee to coordinate the integration of various digital systems (Google Workspace, Open SIS, and TheraNest). I also supervise an MSW intern who is helping to develop intake and clinical operations protocols.

In addition to drafting recommendations for numerous policy changes, I am working to develop a strategy to better train candidates and supervisors. I developed a management dashboard in Excel that aggregates several reports generated from the EHR system, which is used to inform weekly leadership meetings and quarterly board meetings. To produce this I have to manually wrangle and recode data from fields that are inherent in the EHR's database design but are not useful for data analysis and manipulation.

I am to replicate and automate this process in R when some of the more immediate projects are at further stages.