Abstract WP166: Rural Hospitals Abstraction Workshop Improves Understanding of Data Entry

Introduction: Rural counties in the United States have a 30% higher mortality when compared to urban. In Wisconsin (WI) thirty percent of residents live in a rural area and are more often served by smaller hospitals with limited stroke-specific resources. Knowing this, ensuring accurate stroke data entry in WI is imperative as performance improvement (PI) efforts are developed from it. Oftentimes rural hospitals lack substantial stroke-specific resources leading to abstractors oftentimes being emergency room managers or registered nurses with no dedicated time for abstraction, and must fit it into their regular work assignment. WI determined the need for an abstraction workshop devoted to rural hospitals stroke abstractors. Methods: WI Coverdell Stroke Program (WCSP) in partnership with American Hospital Association (AHA) developed a mock record specific to rural hospitals abstraction data measures found in Get With The Guidelines® (GWTG), we then held an all-day workshop where attendees abstracted the record in small groups of three to four. To augment a learning environment and build relationships, each group had novice to expert abstractors as well as were from different hospitals. The mock record was reviewed with facilitation from WCSP and AHA with an emphasis on the difficult to interpret data measures. To ensure teaching strategies and the provided workshop was effective, a survey was completed by the 13 attendees prior to and after the event. Results: Of the four questions surveyed all had improvement when comparing answers of somewhat or very confident pre-session versus post-session: How to navigate the GWTG coding instructions from 62% to 93% Abstracting accurate data from the electronic health record into GWTG from 84% to 92% Understand the data elements required for a drip and ship patient from 62% to 92% Understand rural acute stroke measures from 62% to 93% Conclusions: In conclusion, an abstraction workshop provided strictly for abstractors from rural hospitals provides a safe and collaborative learning environment. Clean data entry is the goal as rural hospitals have few stroke patients where even one fallout can detrimentally affect their data, and it is used to determine individual hospitals PI initiatives. Rural hospitals with their limited resources, likely affected our numbers who participated in this in-person event. Ensuring hospitals understand the benefit and value of this workshop is a need.