Thank you for checking out our Fall 2021 newsletter. We have a lot of news inside, so please keep reading. We are delighted that Keli DeVries, LMSW joined our team as our Program Manager at the end of June. Keli brings her experience as a clinical social worker and leader to our team and after only a few months, we feel like she’s been with us forever. Her leadership style is a perfect fit for our team, and I know that you will enjoy getting to know her. We also need to share that Nicole Timmerman, Samkeliso (Sam) Beusterien, and Jisha Panicker have left MOQC for the next chapters in their lives and will be missed by us and by those of you who know these gifted senior project managers. Recruiting is underway and we will announce new team members soon!
As you’ll see from Dr. Mackler’s letter, we continue to center equity in our strategic plan. We are hoping that we will be able to have complete data on patients’ self-reported race and ethnicity so that we can begin to determine whether or not we have demonstrable disparities in the treatment of minoritized patients across the state. Our website has resources to help you collect race and ethnicity in a patient-centered way.
As we move to our new data vendor, we hope to have a greater number of patients in our database. This will allow us to have more confidence in our data. Cindy Michalek, Heather Behring, Kleo Kolizeras, and Ermili Potka, our MOQC abstraction team, will be working with your practices to decrease the burden on your practice while generating data that we can trust as we continuously strive to improve care across Michigan.
You may be wondering what will happen to the QOPI database after 2022. I’ve answered some of the questions we have been hearing further on in this newsletter.
Dr. Jennifer Griggs
Program Director