Purpose:

To develop a new “best practice” standard for managed care organizations seeking to intervene with their patients who use tobacco.

Objectives:

• Automate collection of tobacco use status and provider advice to quit data for all adult patients in primary care.
• Develop a data repository and other systems which support the provision of a patient’s tobacco status “on-line” to providers, the feeding of tobacco use data to other relevant databases, the capacity to generate proactive letters/phone calls to tobacco users and recent quitters, and linkages to our Health Risk Assessment systems.
• Review the literature on centralized follow-up.
• Strengthen linkages with research partners and build a team for a full evaluation project.
• Clarify key evaluation questions for a larger-scale evaluation.