10/03/2019
Marta Sylvia, Senior Manager, Quality Improvement and Outcomes Research
Your patient education data is a powerful untapped resource. It can uncover gaps in care, improve patient experience, and show you how consistently your organization follows policies and procedures. Data and metrics may sound boring, intimidating, or irrelevant—after all, you're in the business of helping patients, not running numbers, right?—but what if I told you this information could help you improve patient safety and outcomes?
I recently teamed up with Vicki Maisonneuve, director of the Nursing Center for Excellence and Magnet Program at Parkview Health, for a webinar on how to use data to drive quality improvement. In it, we covered the four basic steps to creating your own QI initiative:
Using these four steps, let's look at how a hospital could use their existing patient education data to improve patient safety.
Healthcare has a long way to go to become a high-reliability industry, but consistent patient education can help you reduce the variability associated with patient safety events. Making the decision to track your data can feel overwhelming, but remember you already have a wealth of information at your fingertips. You're not starting from scratch—everything you need is already in your EMR. Just decide where you want to go and which metrics will help you get there.
Still unsure how to start? In our recent webinar, Vicki went into detail about how her quality improvement initiative played out at her hospital. By tracking the rate of usage in their EMR, Parkview raised their patient satisfaction HCAHPS scores—and had the data to prove patient education made the difference. Watch the video to see examples of how Parkview tracked their data, and how you can do the same.
1 https://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/6/NPSG_Chapter_HAP_Jan2019.pdf