Quality Improvement Basics

The QI process is grounded in the following basic concepts:

• Establish a culture of quality in your practice. Your practice’s organization, processes, and procedures should support and be integrated with your QI efforts. The culture of a practice—attitudes, behaviors, and actions—reflect how passionately the practice team embraces quality. The QI culture looks different for every practice, but may include establishing dedicated QI teams, holding regular QI meetings, or creating policies around your QI goals.
• Determine and prioritize potential areas for improvement. You will need to identify and understand the ways in which your practice could improve. Examine your patient population (e.g., to identify barriers to care, frequently diagnosed chronic conditions, or groups of high-risk patients) and your practice operations (e.g., to identify management issues such as low morale, long patient wait times, or poor communication). Use established quality measures, such as those from the National Quality Forum(www.qualityforum.org), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality(www.qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov), and the Quality Payment Program(qpp.cms.gov) to guide your efforts.
• Collect and analyze data. Data collection and analysis lie at the heart of quality improvement. Your data will help you understand how well your systems work, identify potential areas for improvement, set measurable goals, and monitor the effectiveness of change. It’s important to collect baseline data before you begin a QI project, commit to regular data collection, carefully analyze your results throughout the project, and make decisions based on your analysis.
• Communicate your results. Quality improvement efforts should be transparent to your staff, physicians, and patients. Include the entire practice team and patients when planning and implementating QI projects, and communicate your project needs, priorities, actions, and results to everyone (patients included). When a project is successful, celebrate and acknowledge that success.
• Commit to ongoing evaluation. Quality improvement is an ongoing process. A high-functioning practice will strive to continually improve performance, revisit the effectiveness of interventions, and regularly solicit patient and staff feedback.
• Spread your successes. Share lessons learned with others to support wide-scale, rapid improvement that benefits all patients and the health care industry as a whole.
• References