Enabling the Healthcare Quality Improvement Cycle

Todd Lunsford

Syntex Management Systems, Inc.

The key to improving quality in healthcare organizations is to ensure that unplanned events, issues, audits, reviews, and other quality and risk-related programs are managed effectively and performed consistently. Each should follow a quality improvement cycle, which includes:

1. Discovering and reporting near misses, low consequence events and issues
2. Responding to and diagnosing these items and determining their root causes, and
3. Implementing, closing, and validating action items to correct the problems at the source and prevent them from occurring in other areas.

It is important to optimize existing events and processes by applying, monitoring, and improving the key elements of the quality improvement cycle. The right information system will enable the quality improvement cycle, and will consequently provide the data collection, automation, and analytics that are necessary for continuous improvement.

"To reduce risk and improve quality, you must know the risks and issues that you face. For a system to provide this information it must be easy to use, and it should enable the collection of many different types of events, issues, near misses, audit and survey results, etc. with minimal impact on the user. It should also integrate data from other systems that can be analyzed along with the events that are reported. For example, you could integrate human resource staffing information to compare incidents with staffing shortages to determine if short-staffing is an underlying contributor to poor performance.

"To engage personnel in essential activities and to enable process improvements, an information system must be simple and unobtrusive, and must make day-to-day operations more efficient. The system should automate as much as possible, so that data can be collected, personnel can be notified, tasks can be assigned, and actions can be completed faster than via manual methods. Automatic email notifications ensure communications occur according to procedure and without effort. Automatic assignments bring the right people in at the right time, without mistake. Many tasks can be completed within email, eliminating the need to navigate into an information system. Business rules ensure the steps are followed in a prescriptive manner. All of these functions combine to streamline the full life cycle of events and action items.

"To make informed decisions that will result in quality improvements, and to efficiently satisfy regulatory requirements, you must have robust reporting tools. When data collection is centralized into a single platform, regulatory reports can be automatically produced, approved, and distributed. Ad-hoc analytical tools will enable you to identify trends in event types, non-compliance issues, root causes, and many other items. Dashboards, charts, and graphs present information in a clear manner and highlight areas that are doing well, and others that need improvement. The right analytical tools will not only monitor performance, but will also automatically place information into the hands of the right people so that they can evaluate it, make decisions, and take appropriate action."

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   Syntex Management Systems Inc.    White Paper: Enabling the Healthcare Quality Improvement Cycle    White Paper: Enabling the Healthcare Quality Improvement Cycle [OC]