RESPEC Project

The Rural Primary Health Care Act (RPHCA) Program, which provides state funding for primary care clinics throughout New Mexico, is responsible for tracking medical services provided in the rural and most remote parts of New Mexico and for tracking 99 contractors who provide these medical services. The program, using an antiquated tracking system based on Lotus Notes and spreadsheets, greatly needed modernization. RESPEC staff was contracted to make appropriate upgrades to the system used for collecting, storing, and reporting data. The existing application was migrated to a web-based portal where staff and contractors could easily upload data, track progress, run detailed reports, and derive statistical information for the legislature to use to justify refunding the project.

The client was pleased with the results and authorized a second phase of the project to develop better tools for data mining. RESPEC staff developed an administrative module for the staff at RPHCA. While the front-end was designed to move the end user through the website from left to right (minimizing potential for error and confusion), the back-end administrative area encouraged and enabled the staff to locate subcategories of information. Staff members could filter the end user-provided information by contractor, site, month, fiscal year, and various groupings of “patient encounter” type.

Phase III of the project was focused on better analysis for comparing data from one year to another to identify trends over a multiyear period in the number of patient encounters or in revenue collected by a facility. Trends are displayed in a bar chart, line chart, or even choropleth maps where appropriate. A better understanding of how different facilities perform each year has helped the RPHCA staff ensure that their funding is efficiently used.

Having substantially reduced the time necessary to provide and track data for both agency staff and contractors, RESPEC continues to work on the RPHCA project in a support mode.