21 hours ago Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a quality management process that encourages all health care ... thereby transforming patient care in ways that might have been difficult or impossible with paper records alone. This Primer introduces CQI concepts, strategies, and techniques a practice can use to design an effective ... Optimize use of an ... >> Go To The Portal
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a quality management process that encourages all health care ... thereby transforming patient care in ways that might have been difficult or impossible with paper records alone. This Primer introduces CQI concepts, strategies, and techniques a practice can use to design an effective ... Optimize use of an ...
May 02, 2019 · Continuous Quality Improvement Strategies. Many well-established continuous quality improvement (CQI) programs and strategies exist to help your organization improve efficiency, health care quality, and patient outcomes. These four CQI strategies are widely used in the health care industry today. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Model for …
This chapter focuses on data collection procedures and quality assurance principles for patient registries. Data management—the integrated system for collecting, cleaning, storing, monitoring, reviewing, and reporting on registry data—determines the utility of the data for meeting the goals of the registry. Quality assurance, on the other hand, aims to assure that the data were, in fact ...
Once that is the case, the CQI believes that three things underpin successful quality management: effective governance that defines the organisation's aims and translates them into action, robust systems of assurance to make sure things stay on track, and a culture of improvement to keep getting better. These three themes are at the heart of ...
Patient portals may enhance patient engagement by enabling patients to access their electronic medical records (EMRs) and facilitating secure patient-provider communication.
Further, portals help providers educate their patients and prepare them for future care encounters. When patients have access to their health data, they are better informed, and have the potential to generate deep and meaningful conversations regarding patient wellness during doctor's appointments.May 13, 2016
Portals can increase patient loyalty. The ongoing relationship and communication that occurs outside of appointments encourages patients to feel cared for and to remain loyal to your practice. Increase your value. Patients value the easy access to information and direct communication that comes with portal use.
The care team is now able to keep in contact with patients more reliably and ask them direct questions when needed. Using the portal has enabled the organization to be more transparent and interactive with patients, and to proactively send patients the information they need.
7:258:41How to use a patient portal - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipIf you think you would like to sign up for your medical centre's patient portal then talk to theMoreIf you think you would like to sign up for your medical centre's patient portal then talk to the staff when you're there next or give them a call they will ask for your email address and then they
What are the Top Pros and Cons of Adopting Patient Portals?Pro: Better communication with chronically ill patients.Con: Healthcare data security concerns.Pro: More complete and accurate patient information.Con: Difficult patient buy-in.Pro: Increased patient ownership of their own care.Feb 17, 2016
The truth is, there are a lot of benefits to using a patient portal for providers.Better Patient Communication. ... Streamline Patient Registration and Administrative Tasks. ... Greater Focus on Patient Care. ... Better Patient-Physician Relationships. ... Improve Clinical Outcomes. ... Optimize Medical Office Workflow.Dec 8, 2017
The reason why most patients do not want to use their patient portal is because they see no value in it, they are just not interested. The portals do not properly incentivize the patient either intellectually (providing enough data to prove useful) or financially.
For some people, they avoid using the portals altogether for reasons like security issues, low health literacy, or lack of internet. Even for those who do access their accounts, there are still other disadvantages of patient portals.Nov 11, 2021
The VA has actively implemented technology to foster patient engagement, through access to their health information. The VA has actively implemented technology to foster patient engagement, through access to their health information. This is a critical step in supporting patients as active healthcare partners. In 2010, the VA Blue Button was released, offering several patient engagement features that include the ability to access and download personal health information to foster continuity of care, which includes a Continuity of Care document. The patient can authorize access to the information for both VA and community providers. This project incorporates recognized industry standards to support the exchange of information between providers and healthcare systems. A recent addition to Blue Button in 2012 was VA Open Notes, which allows veterans to view progress notes, in an effort to foster discussion with providers and enhance patient engagement. Another emerging patient engagement technology initiative is being adopted from the GetWellNetwork to promote and support a national strategy and approach to providing inpatient-centered tools and resources across VA. Although this work is in its infancy, the outcome is to improve patient access to education and the healthcare team, thereby increasing satisfaction among veterans and their families.
Kaiser Permanente is an integrated healthcare delivery system composed of 37 hospitals, over 600 outpatient facilities, and 49,000 nurses across 9 states and the District of Columbia. KP is also the nation’s largest non-profit health plan with 9 million members. The Permanente Medical Groups have a shared mission and governance with the hospitals and close alignment with contract hospitals in regions that do not have inpatient facilities. KP has the largest private electronic health record (EHR) reaching Stage 7 of the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model ( HIMSS Analytics, 2013 ). As a nation, the U.S. is at the beginning of this journey, with only 1.9% of hospitals at Stage 7 at the end of 2012. KP is ahead of the curve in the implementation and optimization of the EHR allowing it to leverage real-time data, advanced analytics, performance improvement, and patient engagement to support true clinical transformation.
Quality and performance improvement initiatives are driving significant changes in the United States healthcare system. In anticipation of the full implementation of national health reform over the next several years, the pace of these changes has been increasing. The goals of these quality initiatives mirror the National Quality Strategy's three aims which developed out of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s triple aim of improving the patient care experience, improving the population’s health, and reducing healthcare costs. Projects are underway across the United States to achieve these aims. In this article, Chief Nursing Officers of three of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Kaiser Permanente, and Ascension Health, have outlined their organizations’ quality and performance improvement initiatives. Their forward-thinking projects broadly address several aspects of healthcare, including reduction of hospital-acquired conditions, patient engagement, and the integration of mobile technologies and other informatics solutions to improve clinical workflows and increase registered nurses’ access to knowledge resources. The article then offers a brief analysis and conclusion of these three exemplars. The projects span the information systems life cycle: some are well established and continuing to improve, others have been recently implemented, and still others planned for implementation in the near future.
The vision of this organization is to support veteran patient engagement and to transform healthcare through technology, making it more efficient, effective, and patient-centered.
Inefficiencies in communication and location affect both nurses and patients. Inefficiencies in communication and location affect both nurses and patients. Time spent hunting for supplies and equipment impact the available time for patient care. Patient flow is impacted, inconveniencing the patient and wasting valuable time, when nurses must wait for exam or treatment rooms to open, or a patient bed needs to be located when the unit has no available space. The VA is poised to release a nationally integrated, enterprise Real Time Locator System (RTLS) over the next five years. The RTLS solution combines tags, hardware, and software that allows users to interact with the RTLS data. This has significant implications for streamlining nursing and patient workflow. Individual VA RTLS databases will be aggregated to provide an enterprise-wide view of the data using predictive analysis and business intelligence tools.
Point of care bar code scanning technology provides enhanced patient safety and patient care. Bar Code Medication Administration (BCMA) was first implemented in the VA in 1995 to improve the accuracy of the medication administration process. Positive patient identification ensures the veteran receives ‘the right drug at the right time to the right patient.’ All inpatient care areas in VA use positive patient identification at the point of care to document activities associated with BCMA. Point of care bar code scanning technology provides enhanced patient safety and patient care. As each patient wristband and medication is scanned, BCMA validates the medication is ordered, timely, and in the correct dosage. By doing so, the rate of medication errors has decreased across VA.
Nurses have a key role in delivery of high quality patient care and EHRs should support clinical decision-making and professional practice. Nursing leaders across KP’s four inpatient regions have collaboratively built CDS tools within the EHR to support evidence-based practice and individualized care. Since 2010, KP has been leveraging CDS and data mining to support the prevention of pressure ulcers.
However, health systems have the ability to improve care, patient experience, and save lives through quality improvement projects that reduce clinical variation, preventable medical errors, hospital acquired infections, delays in patient discharge, and improve the bottom line.
In order to reduce medication-related adverse events the health system initially considered expanding the involvement of pharmacists performing medication therapy management (MTM) to a group of Medicaid patients covered by a shared-risk contract.
While there are many different definitions of quality improvement, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) defines it as “systematic and continuous actions that lead to measurable improvement in health care services and the health status of targeted patient groups.”.
Once these three things are in alignment, health systems can tackle clinical, financial, and operational quality improvement projects like the examples covered here and make incredible strides in the clinical, financial, and operational health of the organization.
Health Catalyst offers a roadmap to use best practice, adoption, and analytics together to drive outcomes improvement. This article provides examples of quality improvement in healthcare that may help others in their journey.
Patient-reported data are data specifically collected from the patient for the purposes of the registry rather than interpreted through a clinician or an indirect data source (e.g., laboratory value, pharmacy records). Such data may range from basic demographic information to validated scales of patient-reported outcomes (PROs). From an operational perspective, a wide range of issues should be considered in obtaining data directly from patients. These range from presentation (e.g., font size, language, reading level) to technologies (e.g., paper-and-pencil questionnaires, computer inputs, telephone or voice inputs, or hand-held patient diaries). Mistakes at this level can inadvertently bias patient selection, invalidate certain outcomes, or significantly affect cost. Limiting the access for patient reporting to particular languages or technologies may limit participation. Patients with specific diagnoses may have difficulties with specific technologies (e.g., small font size for visually impaired, paper and pencil for those with rheumatoid arthritis). Other choices, such as providing a PRO instrument in a format or method of delivery that differs from how it was validated (e.g., questionnaire rather than interview), may invalidate the results. For more information on patient-reported outcome development and use, see Chapter 5.
Quality assurance, on the other hand, aims to assure that the data were, in fact, collected in accordance with these procedures and that the data stored in the registry database meet the requisite standards of quality, which are generally defined based on the intended purposes. In this chapter, the term registry coordinating activities refers to the centralized procedures performed for a registry, and the term registry coordinating center refers to the entity or entities performing these procedures and overseeing the registry activities at the site and patient levels.
Steps for assuring data quality include: 1 Training: Educate data collectors/abstracters in a structured manner. 2 Data completeness: When possible, provide sites with immediate feedback on issues such as missing or out-of-range values and logical inconsistencies. 3 Data consistency: Compare across sites and over time. 4 Onsite audits for a sample of sites: Review screening logs and procedures and/or samples of data. 5 For-cause audits: Use both predetermined and data-informed methods to identify potential sites at higher suspicion for inaccuracy or intentional errors, such as discrepancies between enrollment and screening logs, narrow data ranges, and overly high or low enrollment.
As further described in Chapter 4, the use of standardized coding dictionaries is an increasingly important tool in the ability to aggregate registry data with other databases. As the health information community adopts standards, registries should routinely apply them unless there are specific reasons not to use such standard codes. While such codes should be implemented in the data dictionaries during registry planning, including all codes in the interface is not always possible. Some free text may be entered as a result. When free text data are entered into a registry, recoding these data using standardized dictionaries (e.g., MedDRA, WHODRUG, SNOMED ®) may be worthwhile. There is cost associated with recoding, and in general, it should be limited to data elements that will be used in analysis or that need to be combined or reconciled with other datasets, such as when a common safety database is maintained across multiple registries and studies.
The data collection procedures for each registry should be clearly defined and described in a detailed manual. The term manual here refers to the reference information in any appropriate form, including hard copy, electronic, or via interactive Web or software-based systems. Although the detail of this manual may vary from registry to registry depending on the intended purpose, the required information generally includes protocols, policies, and procedures; the data collection instrument; and a listing of all the data elements and their full definitions. If the registry has optional fields (i.e., fields that do not have to be completed on every patient), these should be clearly specified.
The sources of data for a registry may include new information collected from the patient, new or existing information reported by or derived from the clinician and the medical record, and ancillary stores of patient information, such as laboratory results. Since registries for evaluating patient outcomes should employ uniform and systematic methods of data collection, all data-related procedures—including the permitted sources of data; the data elements and their definitions; and the validity, reliability, or other quality requirements for the data collected from each source—should be predetermined and defined for all collectors of data. As described in Section 3, “Quality Assurance,” below, data quality is dependent on the entire chain of data collection and processing. Therefore, the validity and quality of the registry data as a whole ultimately derive from the least, not the most, rigorous link.
An electronic medical record (EMR) is an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that can be created, gathered, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff within one health care organization. More complete than an EMR, an electronic health record (EHR) is an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be created, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff across more than one health care organization. 7 For the purposes of this discussion, we will refer to the more limited capabilities of the EMR.
The CQI is the only chartered body for quality professionals.
Quality management is about making organisations perform for their stakeholders – from improving products, services, systems and processes, to making sure that the whole organisation is fit and effective. Managing quality means constantly pursuing excellence: making sure that what your organisation does is fit for purpose, ...
Quality isn’t just an issue for commercial enterprises. Every organisation has stakeholders of one kind or another whose needs they must strive to meet, which is what effective quality management is ultimately about.
In this article, patient access means how patients can access information or data about their healthcare. Therefore, an increase in patient access will help patients feel more in control of their healthcare experience and its outcome. Today patients are engaging with their healthcare more so than ever before.
It is likely that by having more knowledge and control of their healthcare, your patients will feel more satisfied with the care that you provide to them.
Here are five tips for protecting your practice against criminal computer hackers: 1 Educate your staff on how to use the software properly and how people hack into systems. Your staff needs to be aware of where the weak spots are. 2 Keep your software up-to-date so that it’s less at risk of being hacked. 3 Change your password frequently. This one can be annoying, but as with your personal accounts, don’t use the same password for all of your accounts. 4 Limit access to the software. When there are too many people logging in and out, this increases your risk of being hacked. 5 Have a plan in place so that if you are hacked, you know what to do next. For example, you’ll have to notify your patients that their information was hacked. They’re likely going to be very upset, which can be a tedious and messy fix on many levels.
The worst thing you can do is to ignore negative feedback. You definitely want to address it and quickly. The longer you wait to respond, the more time it leaves for other patients to chime in or for rumors to start. Poorly managed referrals can cost your healthcare practice. Don’t respond aggressively.
Yet, like everything else in life, more knowledge can be a good or a bad thing. There are definitely pros and cons to consider when it comes to improving patient access. Below is an outline of three pros and cons for you to think about when taking steps to improve patient access in your practice.
Nurses must have a decent work environment. To begin with, they need sufficient breaks to eat, go to the bathroom, and catch their breaths. Nurses also need communication tools that enable them to connect and collaborate more efficiently. Using effective communication tools can simplify and streamline clinical workflows.
Rather than require everyone to work 12-hour shifts, they can try to meet staff members’ individual needs. For example, a nurse who wants to go back to school to earn a higher degree may want to work on weekends, and a nurse who needs to spend more time with her family may want to work only during the week.