Recommendations for expanding a hospital’s HIT. Write a quality improvement proposal, 5-7 pages in length, that provides your recommendations for expanding a hospital’s HIT to include quality metrics that will help the organization qualify as an accountable care organization.
Introduction
Health care has undergone a transformation since the release of the Institute of Medicine’s 2000 report To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. The report highlighted medical errors as a contributing factor leading to poor patient outcomes. The Institute of Medicine challenged organizations to implement evidence-based performance improvement strategies in order to improve patient quality and safety. Multiple governmental and regulatory agencies, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), vowed to strengthen and improve incentives for participation, safety, quality, and efficiency in accountable care organizations (ACOs).
Health information technology (HIT) performs an essential role in improving health outcomes of individuals, the community, and populations. Health organizations, consumer advocacy groups, and regulatory committees have made a commitment to explore current and future opportunities that HIT offers to continue momentum to meet the Institute of Medicine’s goal of improving safety and quality.
Understanding HIT is important to improving individual, community, and population access to health care and health information. HIT enables quick and easy access to information for both patients and providers. Accessible information has been shown to improve the patient care experience and reduce redundancies, thereby reducing health care costs.
This assessment provides an opportunity for you to make recommendations for expanding a hospital’s HIT in ways that will help the hospital qualify as an ACO.
Reference
Institute of Medicine. (2000). To err is human: Building a safer health system. National Academies Press.
5 Recommendations for Hospitals & Nurses to Improve Patient Experience
1. Turn caregivers into allies. Educate the staff to the importance of including caregivers in caring for patients both in the hospital and at home. As partners, these individuals can be significant supporters to nurses’ efforts to provide quality patient care.
2. Prepare the clinical staff to work with caregivers. Build an empathic clinical staff that can effectively deliver care to the patient while also providing attention to the caregiver. More and more, the patient-caregiver is becoming a key judge of care quality.
3. Create a culture of shared accountability. A superior nursing team will help each other respond to patient needs, not ignore a patient’s call because “he’s not my patient.”
4. Understand how caregivers impact hospital image and reimbursement. Every impression matters. Poor performance by a member of the nursing team can degrade the entire team’s performance. Hospitals should recruit, train and retain staff that understands the service side of the care experience.
5. Provide consistent quality patient care. Hardwire consistency into patient care. Ensure quality patient engagement is replicated throughout the care team, measuring for effectiveness and tracking for improvement.