Are you under pressure to design, develop, and implement a Quality Improvement or Performance Improvement program within your healthcare organization?

Do you lose sleep at night thinking about how to collect, aggregate, analyze and report clinical data to meet various requirements mandated by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations -- not to mention the mandates from state and federal agencies?

Perhaps you're looking at stacks of paper forms or lists of computer spreadsheet files and wondering how they could possible support a robust, data intensive Quality or Performance Improvement initiative.

Of course, you're not alone.

Many healthcare professionals have adopted quality management principals such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) and other data-driven methodologies for conducting, achieving, and sustaining Quality Improvement and Performance Improvement projects1. The problem is that the amount of data collection, aggregation and statistical analysis required to meet these lofty quality principals requires a long term commitment of time and resources that most healthcare organizations simply cannot afford.

NetHealth is here to help.

Incorporating our Web based solutions into your quality improvement and performance improvement projects can reduce the resource burden of collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting clinical data.

Your healthcare organization has probably replaced pen and paper with computer spreadsheets, databases, and statistical programs like MiniTab.

NetHealth takes you the next step, to Web based programs that increase the efficiency of data entry, and automate the tasks of data processing, statistical analysis, and dissemination. Having these powerful data management and automation tools on hand reduces the burden for your organization, simplifies overall project implementation and ensures your performance and quality initiative will stay on track over time.

To assist healthcare organizations, we have developed a Performance Improvement Platform that provides guidance through medical chart abstraction of de-identified data. The Platform enables physicians to reflect on practice data, develop and implement an improvement plan, and assess and report the impact of changes.

NetHealth's PI CME activities are based on the American Medical Association’s learning model for long-term performance improvement. NetHealth's Performance Improvement Platform takes healthcare providers through the following phased process:

1. Initial Data Collection: Here the user will enter roughly 10-15 charts and include only the de-identified data that relates to the guidelines or measures that are being evaluated. Based on the data entered, the system will identify quality measures that may be selected for improvement.
2. Improvement Phase: At this point, the healthcare provider selects measures for improvement and is guided through the process of developing a performance plan using validated guidelines to set goals. The performance measures are briefly discussed and links are provided to information sources and further details.
3. Remeasurement: After working on the improvement plan over a period of time, the provider enters data from another 10-15 random patient charts to compare quality or performance.
4. Completion and Submission of Reports: In this phase, providers see how performance has changedover time. They are presented questions to help them reflect on the results and the impact to their quality of care. The data are then submitted for credit (CME / MOC) and the process is complete.

NetHealth's PI CME program guides physicians through all stages and enables them to easily collect and enter data from their own practices using chart reviews, self-assessments, and patient surveys. Our staff is available throughout the program to assist with any needed clarification. For each stage completed, 5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ can be earned, with a total of 20 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ awarded if all stages of PI CME are completed.

Web based technology from NetHealth helps healthcare organizations perform quality improvement and performance improvement activities more successfully and more efficiently. Automating manual data collection, analysis and dissemination gives you the freedom to investigate performance more thoroughly and commit limited resources to achieving project results in less time¹.

Reference
1. "Web-Based Tools Aid Quality Improvement Projects" by Sanjaya Kumar, MD, MSc, MPH, Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare, July/September 2004.

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