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

Are you troubled, by the daunting prospect of the means for collecting, aggregating, analyzing and reporting large amounts of clinical data to meet various requirements mandated by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations -- not to mention changing mandates from state and federal agencies?

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

Of course, you're not alone.

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

NetHealth is here to help.

Incorporating a web-based solution into your QI and PI projects will significantly reduce the time and resource burden of collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting clinical data.

Your organization has likely replaced pen and paper with computer spreadsheets, databases, and statistical programs like SPSS.

NetHealth will help you to take the next step, to web-based programs that increase the efficiency of data entry, automating the tasks of data processing, statistical analysis, and dissemination. With these powerful data management and automation tools on hand the burden for your organization will be reduced, simplifying overall project implementation and ensuring that your performance and quality initiatives stay on track over time.

We have developed a customized Performance Improvement Platform providing guidance through medical chart abstraction of de-identified data and the entire process of PI plan development, implementation, and re-assessment. This Platform further enables physicians to reflect on personal, practice-based data, assessing and reporting the impact of improvement changes. This process also supports the development of an established culture of continuous assessment and improvement within organizations like yours.

NetHealth's PI CME activities are based on the American Medical Association’s learning model for long-term performance improvement, guiding health care providers through the following four-phase process:

1. Initial Data Collection: The user enters roughly 10-30 charts, including only the de-identified data related to guidelines or ‘measures’ being evaluated. Based on the data entered, the system identifies quality measures recommended for improvement.
2. Improvement Phase: Next, the user selects specific measures for improvement and is guided through the process of developing a personalized Performance Improvement Plan, using industry validated guidelines to set goals. The performance measures are briefly discussed and links to information sources, guidelines, and improvement tools are provided.
3. Remeasurement: After working on the improvement plan for a specified period of time (generally 3 to 6 months), the health care provider enters data from another set of patient charts to assess performance changes.
4. Completion and Submission of Reports: In this phase, participants have the opportunity to discern how their performance has changed in comparison to the first abstraction. They are then presented with 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/ CNE, etc.) and the process is complete.

Suitable for implementation individually, or for practice or departmental groups, NetHealth's PI CME program guides health care providers through each stage, enabling them to easily collect and enter data from their own practices using chart reviews, self-assessments, and patient surveys. Our staff remains available throughout the program to assist with any needs. For each stage completed, 5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits^TM can be earned, for a total of 20 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits^TM awarded if all stages of PI CME are completed.

The web-based PI Platform from NetHealth helps health care organizations carry out customized quality and performance improvement activities, more efficiently and more successfully – with lasting impact. Automating manual data collection, analysis and dissemination will give you the freedom to investigate performance and quality improvement efforts more thoroughly, committing 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 Health care, July/September 2004.

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