The Joint Commission's Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation Process: Costly, Ineffective, and Potentially Harmful to Safety Culture.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the estimated labor costs and effectiveness of Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) processes at identifying outlier performers in a large sample of providers across multiple health care systems and to extrapolate costs and effectiveness nationally. METHODS: Six hospital systems partnered to evaluate their labor expenses related to conducting OPPE. Estimates for mean labor hours and wages were created for the following: data analysts, medical staff office professionals, department physician leaders, and administrative assistants. The total number of outlier performers who were identified by OPPE metrics alone and that resulted in lack of renewal, limitation, or revoking of hospital privileges during the past annual OPPE cycle (2022) was recorded. National costs of OPPE were extrapolated. Literature review of the effect of OPPE on safety culture in radiology was performed. RESULTS: The evaluated systems had 12,854 privileged providers evaluated by OPPE. The total estimated annual recurring labor cost per provider was $50.20. Zero of 12,854 providers evaluated were identified as outlier performers solely through the OPPE process. The total estimated annual recurring cost of administering OPPE nationally was $78.54 million. In radiology over the past 15 years, the use of error rates based on score-based peer review as an OPPE metric has been perceived as punitive and had an adverse effect on safety culture. CONCLUSION: OPPE is expensive to administer, inefficient at identifying outlier performers, diverts human resources away from potentially more effective improvement work, and has been associated with an adverse impact on safety culture in radiology.

Improving the reliability of verbal communication between primary care physicians and pediatric hospitalists at hospital discharge.

INTRODUCTION: Timely and reliable verbal communication between hospitalists and primary care physicians (PCPs) is critical for prevention of medical adverse events but difficult in practice. Our aim was to increase the proportion of completed verbal handoffs from on-call residents or attendings to PCPs within 24 hours of patient discharge from a hospital medicine service to ≥90% within 18 months. METHODS: A multidisciplinary team collaborated to redesign the process by which PCPs were contacted following patient discharge. Interventions focused on the key drivers of obtaining stakeholder buy-in, standardization of the communication process, including assigning primary responsibility for discharge communication to a single resident on each team and batching calls during times of maximum resident availability, reliable automated process initiation through leveraging the electronic health record (EHR), and transparency of data. A run chart assessed the impact of interventions over time. RESULTS: The percentage of calls initiated within 24 hours of discharge improved from 52% to 97%, and the percentage of calls completed improved to 93%. Results were sustained for 18 months. Standardization of the communication process through hospital telephone operators, use of the discharge order to ensure initiation of discharge communication, and batching of phone calls were associated with improvements in our measures. CONCLUSION: Reliable verbal discharge communication can be achieved through the use of a standardized discharge communication process coupled with the EHR.

Oral antibiotics at discharge for children with acute osteomyelitis: a rapid cycle improvement project.

BACKGROUND: Substantial evidence demonstrates comparable cure rates for oral versus intravenous therapy for routine osteomyelitis. Evidence adoption is often slow and in our centre virtually all patients with osteomyelitis were discharged on intravenous therapy. OBJECTIVE: For patients with acute osteomyelitis admitted to the hospital medicine service, we aimed to increase the proportion of cases discharged on oral antibiotics to at least 70%. METHODS: The setting for our observational time series study was a large academic children's hospital. The model for improvement and plan-do-study-act cycles were used to test, refine and implement interventions identified through our key driver diagram. Our multifaceted intervention included a shared decision-making tool, an order set in our electronic health record, and education to faculty and trainees. We also included an identify and mitigate intervention to target providers caring for children with osteomyelitis in near-real time and reinforce the evidence-based recommendations. Data were analysed on an annotated g-chart of osteomyelitis cases between patients discharged on intravenous antibiotics. Structured chart review was used to identify treatment failures as well as length of stay and hospital charges in preintervention and postintervention groups. RESULTS: The osteomyelitis cases between patients discharged on intravenous antibiotics increased from a median of 0 preintervention to a maximum of 9 cases following our identify and mitigate intervention. The direction and magnitude of successive improvements observed satisfied criteria for special cause variation. Improvement has been sustained for 1 year. Treatment failure and complications were uncommon in preintervention and postintervention phases. No significant differences in length of stay or charges were detected. CONCLUSIONS: Even for uncommon conditions, rapid and sustained evidence adoption is possible using quality improvement methods.

Prospective evaluation of a pediatric inpatient early warning scoring system.

PURPOSE: The present study evaluated the use of the Pediatric Early Warning Score (PEWS) for detecting clinical deterioration among hospitalized children. DESIGN/METHODS: A prospective, descriptive study design was used. The tool was used to score 2,979 patients admitted to a single medical unit of a pediatric hospital over a 12-month period. RESULTS: PEWS discriminated between children who required transfer to the pediatric intensive care unit and those who did not require transfer (area under the curve = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.84-0.94, p < .001). IMPLICATIONS: The PEWS tool was found to be a reliable and valid scoring system to identify children at risk for clinical deterioration.