Improving the simple, complicated and complex realities of community-acquired pneumonia.

This paper first describes efforts to improve the care for patients hospitalised with community-acquired pneumonia and the associated changes in quality measures at a rural academic medical centre. The results of the improvement interventions and the associated clinical realities, expected outcomes, measures, improvement interventions and improvement aims are then re-examined using the Glouberman and Zimmerman typology of healthcare problems--simple, complicated and complex. The typology is then used to explore the future design and assessment of improvement interventions, which may allow better matching with the types of problem healthcare providers and organisations are confronted with. Matching improvement interventions with problem category has the possibility of improving the success of improvement efforts and the reliability of care while at the same time preserving needed provider autonomy and judgement to adapt care for more complex problems.

Improving safety on the front lines: the role of clinical microsystems.

The clinical microsystem puts medical error and harm reduction into the broader context of safety and quality of care by providing a framework to assess and evaluate the structure, process, and outcomes of care. Eight characteristics of clinical microsystems emerged from a qualitative analysis of interviews with representatives from 43 microsystems across North America. These characteristics were used to develop a tool for assessing the function of microsystems. Further research is needed to assess microsystem performance, outcomes, and safety, and how to replicate "best practices" in other settings.

If improvement of the quality and value of health and health care is the goal, why focus on health professional development?

Connecting organization and issue-centered strategies for the improvement of health care with health professional development strategies offers an exciting opportunity for the next efforts to improve health care.

Using an improvement model to reduce adverse drug events in VA facilities.

BACKGROUND: Adverse drug events cause significant morbidity and mortality in health care. Many adverse drug events are due to medication errors and are preventable. In 1999 and 2000 the Patient Safety Center of Inquiry collaborated with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to implement a quality improvement (QI) project designed to reduce medication errors within the Veterans Administration system. METHODS: During a 6- to 9-month period, interdisciplinary teams that want to achieve much higher levels of performance work on a common aim, under the guidance of faculty, and come together for three 2-day educational and planning sessions. Between these sessions, teams implement some of the suggested changes, measure the results of those changes, and report back to the larger group. RESULTS: During the formal project, teams collected allergy information on more than 20,000 veterans and averted 1,833 medication errors that had the potential to cause adverse events. At 6-month follow-up, the majority of teams remained intact, continued to collect data, and maintained their gains, approximately doubling the results obtained during the formal project. Half of the teams expanded their efforts to other settings, and one-third of the teams expanded beyond their original topics. Returns on investment in the QI effort were substantial. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that gains made in organized QI efforts can be maintained for 6 months without additional external support or coaching if team structure and leadership support remain intact. Facilitators of QI efforts should focus on teams that are having difficulty learning new techniques. Finally, this effort appeared to generate cost savings.

Using the Baldrige management system framework in health care: the Veterans Health Administration experience.

BACKGROUND: In 1998 the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) developed the Quality Achievement Recognition Grant, a competitive grant application open to all Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) within the VHA system and based on the Baldrige management framework. Eight of the 22 VISNs attended the educational programs and initiated the grant application process; 7 completed applications. Team award experts from VHA and external sources reviewed, scored, and wrote feedback reports to all applicants and conducted four site visits. IDENTIFICATION OF BEST PRACTICES AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE APPLICANTS: Each application was compared to examples of ideal applications to identify areas of excellence and areas for improvement. In general, the best applicants identified and described key processes and articulated the methods used to evaluate and improve processes. For example, they were able to identify the process used to incorporate key constituents into the strategy development process. One applicant developed a series of management advisory committees, the membership of which includes veterans' service organizations, academic affiliates, community members, and congressional delegates, which were tapped to develop a strategic plan. Leading applicants in the future are likely to be able to demonstrate evidence of deployment and constant review of the strategy and to emphasize the human resources plan into the strategic planning and deployment. CONCLUSIONS: The Baldrige management framework is a useful tool for identification of areas of achievement and areas for improvement within the VHA. Potential applicants for the award could benefit from ensuring coherence across the application, placing a greater emphasis on work systems, and incorporating more extensive analysis of market conditions.

Using early clinical experiences to integrate quality-improvement learning into medical education.

Health care providers are delivering care in an increasingly complex environment; this requires that providers develop new competencies to better understand their work and to design changes that can help them succeed. Recognizing these new educational requirements, Dartmouth Medical School created a model two-pronged program for teaching quality improvement to its medical students. The goal of the program is to provide students with an active learning experience as well as an education in the theory and application of continuous quality improvement. The program includes two educational experiences: one curriculum is for all medical students and the other is for selected, highly motivated students. The first curriculum is incorporated in Dartmouth's required "On Doctoring" course, in which students spend time with community-based physician preceptors. The quality-improvement curriculum is designed around an improvement project developed at the students' preceptor sites. The second curriculum for students with a special interest in quality improvement is offered as an elective summer program between the first and second years of medical school. Working in groups of two, students identify an area for improvement within a preceptor's practice, assist the practice in articulating an improvement plan, help implement that plan, and write up their experiences. The authors describe the two curricula, factors associated with their successful implementation, and lessons learned.

Collaboration in improving care for patients: how can we find out what we haven't been able to figure out yet?

BACKGROUND: Questions, or what the physicist and learning expert Reginald Revans called "insightful inquiry," are essential to learning. People remember and use what they discover themselves. But many habits and activities in front-line workplaces of patient care have not promoted frank discussions of what we haven't figured out yet about improving care for patients. Leaders are no longer defined by having the right answers. Leaders will be the ones who have the right questions and who promote local learning with the right questions. SUGGESTIONS FOR GETTING STARTED IN COLLABORATION. The authors suggest questions to ask to get collaborative inquiry going and cite examples they have collected. The questions and examples are grouped in seven thematic categories: Listening to and appreciating others; Thinking across disciplines and roles; Sharing ideas and linking those shared ideas to execution and deployment of change; Appreciating systems and interdependencies; Using research (including local research) to inform our practices; Using methods, skills, and techniques as facilitators of collaboration; and Working across organizational boundaries.

Building measurement and data collection into medical practice.

Clinicians can use data to improve daily clinical practice. This paper offers eight principles for using data to support improvement in busy clinical settings: 1) seek usefulness, not perfection, in the measurement; 2) use a balanced set of process, outcome, and cost measures; 3) keep measurement simple (think big, but start small); 4) use qualitative and quantitative data; 5) write down the operational definitions of measures; 6) measure small, representative samples; 7) build measurement into daily work; and 8) develop a measurement team. The following approaches to using data for improvement are recommended. First, begin with curiosity about outcomes or a need to improve results. Second, try to avoid knee-jerk, obstructive criticism of proposed measurements. Instead, propose solutions that are practical, goal-oriented, and good enough to start with. Third, gather baseline data on a small sample and check the findings. Fourth, try to change and improve the delivery process while gathering data. Fifth, plot results over time and analyze them by using a control chart or other graphical method. Sixth, refine your understanding of variation in processes and outcomes by dividing patients into clinically homogeneous subgroups (stratification) and analyzing the results separately for each subgroup. Finally, make further changes while measuring key outcomes over time. Measurement and improvement are intertwined; it is impossible to make improvements without measurement. Measuring and learning from each patient and using the information gleaned to test improvements can become part of daily medical practice in local settings.

Building a quality future.

How can healthcare leaders stay ahead of the curve? What can they do to see what the future holds and to secure a place for their employees and their organizations? They must begin doing today what they need to do to survive tomorrow. Furthermore, they must take wise action today or there will be no tomorrow. This article looks into the future and connects it with what we must see and do today. The article begins with a glimpse of the future and with an exploration of what people really want from health and healthcare. Next, it examines what appear to be inexorable megatrends and healthcare trends that are sweeping through society. This leads us to consider the quality and value imperatives that must be faced to secure a stake in the healthcare delivery. We will discuss a model for managing care for individual patients and small populations by focusing on where patients, populations, and caregivers meet--at the front lines of patients care. We conclude with some advice on how to build sustainable organizations by exploiting the inevitable.

Clinical process cost analysis.

BACKGROUND: New systems of reimbursement are exerting enormous pressure on clinicians and hospitals to reduce costs. Using cheaper supplies or reducing the length of stay may be a satisfactory short-term solution, but the best strategy for long-term success is radical reduction of costs by reengineering the processes of care. However, few clinicians or institutions know the actual costs of medical care; nor do they understand, in detail, the activities involved in the delivery of care. Finally, there is no accepted method for linking the two. METHODS: Clinical process cost analysis begins with the construction of a detailed flow diagram incorporating each activity in the process of care. The cost of each activity is then calculated, and the two are linked. This technique was applied to Diagnosis Related Group 75 to analyze the real costs of the operative treatment of lung cancer at one institution. RESULTS: Total costs varied between $6,400 and $7,700. The major driver of costs was personnel time, which accounted for 55% of the total. Forty percent of the total cost was incurred in the operating room. The cost of care decreased progressively during hospitalization. CONCLUSIONS: Clinical process cost analysis provides detailed information about the costs and processes of care. The insights thus obtained may be used to reduce costs by reengineering the process.

Building knowledge of health care as a system.

A system is a functionally related group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole with a common aim. This article presents a method--a 10-step exercise--for building knowledge of the elements of an interdependent system of health care. Those who seek to improve the work of a system can use this exercise for designing and relating new improvement efforts to the general work of the organization.

Clinical process cost analysis: a promising tool for clinical improvement.

In today's environment, health care organizations are expected to provide the best possible care at the lowest possible cost. Neither aspect can be considered independently, but correlating the two with traditional systems of cost analysis is very difficult. This article presents a new method for linking costs to the process of care that also promises to be a powerful tool for clinical improvement and redesign.

Continually improving the health and value of health care for a population of patients: the panel management process.

Today's primary care provider faces the challenge of caring for individual patients as well as caring for populations of patients. This article offers a model--the panel management process--for understanding and managing these activities and relationships. The model integrates some of the lessons learned during the past decade as we have worked to gain an understanding of the continual improvement of health care after we have understood that care as a process and system.

Improving health care, Part 4: Concepts for improving any clinical process.

BACKGROUND: One promising method for streamlining the generation of "good ideas" is to formulate what are sometimes called change concepts-general notions or approaches to change found useful in developing specific ideas for changes that lead to improvement. For example, in current efforts to reduce health care costs by discounting provider charges, the underlying generic concept is "reducing health care costs," and the specific idea is "discounting provider charges." Short-term gains in health care cost reduction can occur by pursuing discounts. After some time, however, limits to such reduction in costs are experienced. Persevering and continuing to travel down the "discounting provider charges" path is less likely to produce further substantial improvement than returning to the basic concept of "reducing health care costs." THE HIP REPLACEMENT CASE: An interdisciplinary team aiming to reduce costs while improving quality of care for patients in need of hip joint replacement generated ideas for changing "what's done (process) to get better results." After team members wrote down their improvement ideas, they deduced the underlying change concepts and used them to generate even more ideas for improvement. Such change concepts include reordering the sequence of steps (preadmission physical therapy "certification"), eliminating failures at hand-offs between steps (transfer of information from physician's office to hospital), and eliminating a step (epidural pain control). CONCLUSION: Learning about making change, encouraging change, managing the change within and across organizations, and learning from the changes tested will characterize the sustainable, thriving health systems of the future.

The relationship between meeting patients' information needs and their satisfaction with hospital care and general health status outcomes.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine if there is an association between meeting patients' information needs and their overall satisfaction with care and their general health status outcomes. STUDY DESIGN: This non-experimental study used data from hospital medical records as well as patient-completed surveys conducted two and eight weeks post discharge. The setting involved three community hospitals in the southeastern section of the US that provided care to a series of 167 acute myocardial infarction (Acute MI) patients. MEASURES: The independent variable was an index measuring how well patients' information needs were met. The dependent variables were patient satisfaction (ratings of satisfaction with care process, global satisfaction, and health benefit) and general health status outcomes (physical function, psychosocial function and quality of life). Covariates used as control variables to hold patient characteristics constant, included demographics (age, gender) and clinical measures of acute MI severity, comorbidity, angina (at eight weeks), and dyspnea (at eight weeks). ANALYSIS: Univariate analyses were employed to: (1) describe patients' characteristics; (2) determine the relative importance of meeting different types of information needs; and (3) identify information need areas most likely not to be met. Multivariate linear regression and logistic regression was used to evaluate the association between patients' ratings of meeting information needs with satisfaction and health outcomes, respectively, after controlling for covariates. RESULTS: The multivariate regression results show that meeting information needs are positively and significantly associated with both patient satisfaction measures (i.e., Ratings of Care Processes, p < 0.01; Global Satisfaction, p < 0.05, Perceived Health Benefit, p < 0.01) and one general health status measure (i.e. Quality of Life, p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: The results suggest that providers of care should ensure that they meet the information needs of patients with specific conditions because patients' perceptions of both quality of care and quality of life are associated with the clinicians' ability to transfer key information to their patients.

Improving health care, Part 3: Clinical benchmarking for best patient care.

BACKGROUND: Benchmarking, which shows that a much better way of doing something may be possible, stimulates local interest in changing and in making changes previously thought not possible. A PLANNING WORKSHEET: The Worksheet has five basic steps: Identify measures, determine resources needed to find the "best of the best," design a data collection method and gather data, measure the best against own performance to determine gap, and identify the best practices producing best-in-class results. CASE EXAMPLE--BOWEL SURGERY: The Accelerating Clinical Improvement Bowel Surgery Team at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (Lebanon, NH) was formed in November 1994 to improve the care of patients with diagnosis-related group (DRG) 148 or 149. Consulting two large, administrative databases and the medical literature, the team found that a substantial gap existed between the bowel surgery delivery process and the best results, as far as they were known, among comparable organizations. After flowcharting the delivery process, the team identified the high-leverage steps: same-day services, general surgery clinic, and routine care. The team then planned three successive PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycles: utilization of same-day services for all elective surgery patients, establishment of a standardized preoperative bowel preparation, and utilization of pre- and postoperative routine care orders. These improvement cycles resulted in a reduction in length of stay from 9.66 to 8.29 days. Implementation of a critical pathway resulted in a further reduction to 5.04 days. CONCLUSION: Benchmarking can play an integral role in clinical improvement work and can stimulate wise clinical changes and promote measured improvements in quality and value.