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Like many small- and medium-sized practices, the team at Cascades East Family Medicine is always searching for ways to improve care. For Cascades East, this meant enrolling in EvidenceNOW, which connected them with a practice facilitator, Mr. Steven Brantley.

In their work together, Cascades East and Steven first focused on smoking cessation—an important component of heart health. "The Cascades East team was already a champion—screening about 99 percent of their patients for tobacco use," said Steven, but they realized that there was a gap between the percentage of patients they screened for smoking and the percentage of smokers who then received counseling to quit.

Steven helped the Cascades East team identify specific actions that would help close the gap and determine who on the team would be involved in new care processes. The team decided to use their electronic health record to track whether identified smokers were offered smoking cessation counseling. As a result of the team's efforts, in just three months the practice's rate of offering counseling shot up from 12 percent to 70 percent.

Cascades East continues to use data to identify problems, brainstorm solutions, and test them in everyday practice to address other areas of care. "The practice is constantly developing new ideas to improve heart health care," shares Steven. "It's a privilege to work with a team that's doing such great work for the people in their communities."

This story is courtesy of Healthy Hearts Northwest, the EvidenceNOW Northwest Cooperative, led by the MacColl Center at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.