Lantana Group Editor | Lantana Consulting Group: Transforming healthcare through health information

Heather Dubrendris and Amy Webb were authors on an abstract submitted to SHEA for the cancelled 2020 Decennial Conference. The abstract details the efforts from CDC’s NHSN to raise awareness and reporting to the NHSN Antimicrobial Use Option.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collects data from hospitals and other healthcare facilities nationwide which results in a good problem—a wealth of information without an effective way to use it to assess quality at the hospital level. The state of Maryland had publicly reported data which they need to consolidate for a…

The Standardized Antimicrobial Administration Ratio (SAAR) is a risk-adjusted metric of antimicrobial use (AU) developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2015 as a tool for hospital antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) to track and compare AU with a national benchmark. In 2018, CDC updated the SAAR by expanding the locations and…

Nadine Shehab, Chief Scientist, co-authored this CDC report which quantifies changes in outpatient prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, and azithromycin during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is one thing we can do to improve the use of health information? Our team weighs in. Missed our last vlog? Check it out here.

Navigating the healthcare system can be overwhelming during the best of times, but it’s even more challenging during a public health crisis. Seeing the impact on the news and reading about it are different than experiencing it. These are our stories of medical emergencies during the coronavirus crisis. Krisden’s experience – Patient Perspective On April…

Lantana’s Clinical Advisory Council was published on American Nurses Association’s A Year of Stories with their story on how Nurse Informaticists contribute to the fight against COVID-19.

Our CMS Hospital Quality Initiatives Public Reporting Support Contract team (Chris Truman, Larissa Mennen, and Ruby Nash) were invited to present a 15-20 minute overview of the project for the MIDS c3 Forum. The team presented a program overview (including history of this task order), task order purpose and scope, primary tasks and deliverable, upcoming…

Matt Sapiano is second author on this paper, which describes the rate of transfusion‐associated adverse events and the implementation of specific blood safety measures.”

Mathew R.P. Sapiano, PhD contributed to this new study from CDC, Emory and 5 poison centers which found that when young children ingested prescription pills, over half the time the pills had been removed from original packaging by an adult.

Reporting on the usage and growing resistance to antimicrobials is a key objective for the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). In 2017, they engaged Lantana to encourage and support hospital reporting of Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (AUR) data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare and Safety Network (NHSN). Lantana…

I first thought SAS was a coding program used for cleaning up and validating large amounts of data and for generating reports. Since I had never coded before, it seemed too complicated, and I thought I could just use Excel as a data analysis tool. But SAS is more efficient than manually validating data or…

Please register for the upcoming webinar here. As a reminder, the webinar will be held on December 16th at 11AM ET. Please hold this time on your calendar until you receive an e-mail with webinar information. If you have questions, please contact info@lantanagroup.com.

Lantana Consulting Group is pleased to announce that Andrew Laing has joined as Director of Information Analysis and Technology. Laing comes to Lantana from the State of Vermont where he served as the Agency of Human Services Director of Business Architecture and later the state’s first Chief Data Officer.

Lantana Consulting Group is pleased to announce that Nadine Shehab, PharmD, MPH has joined the company as Chief Scientist. Shehab will continue her work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where she provided leadership in adverse drug event (ADE) surveillance using a national public health surveillance system.

Lantana’s Clinical Advisory Council (CAC) had to opportunity to author a Nursing Vignette for National Nurses’ Week featured on the HIMSS website. Click below to read the piece on www.himss.org.

Erin O’Leary presented on NHSN’s risk-adjusted antimicrobial use summary metric, the Standardized Antimicrobial Administration Ratio (SAAR) at the 2019 NHSN Annual Training.

The Lantana Team presented two sessions at the NHSN Annual Training in March 2019. Wendy Wise, MPH, PMP presented on NHSN Antimicrobial Use Option reporting and analysis and Amy Webb, MPH, CHES presented on and Antimicrobial Resistance Option reporting and analysis.

A state HIE needed to find the most efficient path to meet quality reporting targets where each provider site had data that matched up differently against potential target measures. Lantana determined the shortest pathway to predictable, reliable reporting for each site. Our clinical analysts schematized the requirements across the set of potential measures, then assessed…

Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), the primary care case management program for NC Medicaid, found that it needed consistent, structured, and coded data from its community pharmacy partners in the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network (CPESN) in order to support quality metrics. During the initial years of CPESN pharmacy partnerships, community pharmacy encounters with…