A retrospective evaluation of the Perfecting Patient Care University training program for health care organizations.

This study evaluated how the Perfecting Patient Care (PPC) University, a quality improvement (QI) training program for health care leaders and clinicians, affected the ability of organizations to improve the health care they provide. This training program teaches improvement methods based on Lean concepts and principles of the Toyota Production System and is offered in several formats. A retrospective evaluation was performed that gathered data on training, other process factors, and outcomes after staff completed the PPC training. A majority of respondents reported gaining QI competencies and cultural achievements from the training. Organizations had high average scores for the success measures of "outcomes improved" and "sustainable monitoring" but lower scores for diffusion of QI efforts. Total training dosage was significantly associated with the measures of QI success. This evaluation provides evidence that organizations gained the PPC competencies and cultural achievements and that training dosage is a driver of QI success.

The state of innovative emergency medical service programs in the United States.

BACKGROUND: The primary objective of this study was to determine how EMS organizations that are piloting patient-centered treatment and transport protocols are approaching the challenges of implementation, reimbursement, and quality assurance. We were particularly interested in determining if these pilot efforts have raised any patient safety concerns. METHODS: We conducted a set of discussions with a small group of key EMS stakeholders regarding the status of pioneering efforts to develop and evaluate innovative approaches to EMS in the United States. RESULTS: We had discussions with 9 EMS agencies to better understand their innovative programs, including: the history of their service policy and procedure for transports that do not require emergency department care; the impact of their innovative program on service costs and/or cost savings; any reimbursement issues or changes; patient safety; patient satisfaction; and overall impression as well as recommendations for other EMS systems considering adoption of this policy. CONCLUSIONS: In general, EMS systems are not reimbursed for service unless the patient is transported to an ED. Spokespersons for all nine sites covered by this project said that this policy creates a powerful disincentive to implementing pilot programs to safely reduce EMS use by directing patients to more appropriate sites of care or proactively treating them in their homes. Even though private and public hospitals and payers typically benefit from these programs, they have been generally reluctant to offer support. This raises serious questions about the long-term viability of these programs.

The Evolving Role of Emergency Departments in the United States.

The research described in this article was performed to develop a more complete picture of how hospital emergency departments (EDs) contribute to the U.S. health care system, which is currently evolving in response to economic, clinical, and political pressures. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, it explores the evolving role that EDs and the personnel who staff them play in evaluating and managing complex and high-acuity patients, serving as the key decisionmaker for roughly half of all inpatient hospital admissions, and serving as "the safety net of the safety net" for patients who cannot get care elsewhere. The report also examines the role that EDs may soon play in either contributing to or helping to control the rising costs of health care.

CMS Innovation Center Health Care Innovation Awards: Evaluation Plan.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has funded 108 Health Care Innovation Awards, funded through the Affordable Care Act, for applicants who proposed compelling new models of service delivery or payment improvements that promise to deliver better health, better health care, and lower costs through improved quality of care for Medicare, Medicaid, and Children's Health Insurance Program enrollees. CMS is also interested in learning how new models would affect subpopulations of beneficiaries (e.g., those eligible for Medicare and Medicaid and complex patients) who have unique characteristics or health care needs that could be related to poor outcomes. In addition, the initiative seeks to identify new models of workforce development and deployment, as well as models that can be rapidly deployed and have the promise of sustainability. This article describes a strategy for evaluating the results. The goal for the evaluation design process is to create standardized approaches for answering key questions that can be customized to similar groups of awardees and that allow for rapid and comparable assessment across awardees. The evaluation plan envisions that data collection and analysis will be carried out on three levels: at the level of the individual awardee, at the level of the awardee grouping, and as a summary evaluation that includes all awardees. Key dimensions for the evaluation framework include implementation effectiveness, program effectiveness, workforce issues, impact on priority populations, and context. The ultimate goal is to identify strategies that can be employed widely to lower cost while improving care.

Assessing relationships between state and local public health organizations: evidence from the NACCHO 2008 profile of local health departments.

Public health systems vary by degree of centralization, reflecting the distribution of authority, responsibility, and effort between state and local public health agencies. We analyzed data from the 2008 National Association of City and County Health Officials Profile of Local Health Departments survey, and propose an improved composite measure of centralization that can be computed for all local health departments within a state, as opposed to a single state respondent, as done in 1998. While most states' structures (79.5%) are decentralized, the new measure presents a continuum from highly decentralized to highly centralized. The measure was internally consistent (Cronbach α = .87) and correlated somewhat strongly with the centralization classification from the 1998 survey (Kendall's τ correlation = .62, P < .001), suggesting that a stable centralization construct can be reliably determined. This new centralization variable can facilitate more nuanced studies of public health systems, and inform policy design and implementation.

New Equipping Strategies for Combat Support Hospitals.

The U.S. Army uses Combat Support Hospitals (CSHs)-mobile, deployable hospitals housed in tents and expandable containers-to provide surgical and trauma care close to combat action. CSHs typically operate as hospitals only when deployed, and deployments occur only once every three to five years under the Army's rotational cycle. When not deployed, CSHs keep a partial set of equipment at home station for training or possible local emergency medical missions, while the remainder of the unit's equipment is in long-term storage at a site in the high desert of Northern California. This strategy of providing equipment for CSHs has created maintenance and obsolescence challenges. Nondeployed CSHs have old, poorly maintained equipment that is seldom or never used. Further, the Army has not programmed sufficient funds to keep all its CSH sets technologically current; in practice, deploying units do not deploy with their own equipment, but instead receive new medical equipment when deploying or take ownership of existing, upgraded equipment that is already deployed. RAND Arroyo Center researchers developed a new equipping strategy for the Army's CSHs, proposing three options for home station equipment sets: an "Expanded" design that provides more surgical and trauma capability and capacity; an "Enhanced" design that provides roughly the same amount of equipment but improved medical capabilities; and a "Lean" design that provides only enough equipment for some individual and team training. The research team also proposed changing the equipping strategy of deploying CSHs to eliminate much of the unit-owned equipment now residing in long-term storage. Deploying units would instead draw on a shared pool of up-to-date and well-maintained equipment. The proposed strategy would reduce total equipment costs from $1 billion to less than $700 million, leaving the Army with sufficient funds to continually upgrade and maintain both home-station and shared equipment.