Congratulations to Rhodes Amaker, MMHC, VHAN's Director of Network Operations, for winning the Moderators’ Choice Award for his poster presentation at the 2020 Vanderbilt Symposium on Implementation Research in the Learning Health System. The focus of Amaker’s presentation was on Reducing Unwarranted Variation in Care using VHAN’s Low Back Pain Care Path.
With an estimated $5.8 million in waste tied to avoidable spine MRI/CTs and physical therapy, Amaker addressed ways to reduce such unwarranted variation such as providing cost and executive summary information, presenting practice level data to leadership, and working with a pilot practice to develop tactical strategy and implementation. Amaker also spoke about the benefits of interventions such as patient and provider education and coaching, as well as the implementation of VHAN’s Low Back Pain Care Path. The team’s next steps are to collect the data from the pilot practice and scale the results to the second location and leverage interventions for other top opportunity practices.