Improving Quality Family Planning Service Provision Through Interoperability Solutions and Clinical Measures

Health centers play an integral role in the provision of family planning services to reproductive-aged women and men. To support delivery of family planning in FQHC settings, the Office of Population Affairs is laying the foundation for new eMeasures, for contraceptive care, that measure the percentage of reproductive-aged women provided a most effective (i.e., sterilization, contraceptive implants, intrauterine devices or systems) or moderately effective (i.e., injectables, oral pills, patch, ring, or diaphragm) contraceptive method and who have access to long-acting reversible contraceptive methods. A core set of family planning and reproductive health data elements needed to calculate the measures, including new data elements for pregnancy intention, sexual activity, and contraceptive method provided during a clinical encounter, have been mapped to new and existing code sets (including LOINC, SNOMED CT, and RxNorm). Also, two interoperability mechanisms, one that is based in Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CCDA) and one that utilizes Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), are being developed to capture standardized, patient-level data on family planning and reproductive health. Health centers can use these measures to improve the provision of quality family planning services to their clients and ensure these clients have access to the full range of contraceptive methods.