Apply principles and practices of Quality Improvement in clinical

practice. Objectives: By the end of the program, learners will be able to: 1. Explain the difference between process and outcome indicators. 2. Define HEDIS and give examples of these measures. 3. Describe methods for measuring performance and assessing quality of care. 4. Access and manage medical information to profile practice patterns. 5. Use empirical data and systematic quality improvement strategies to improve the process and outcomes of care. 6. Interpret patient satisfaction measurements and apply them in designing improvements. 3Errors in medicine is a hot topic these days. If you wanted to get a sense of the errors in your group practice, how would you go about doing that? You could ask each of your partners if they were following the guidelines for a specific disease. You could ask you partners to keep track of their errors or possible errors. But, these methods would be wrought with problems of validity and reliability. So, how could you get at the issue of errors. Well, lets break it down a bit. Let’s start with one small problem. Perhaps we want to see how well we are doing with patients with a chronic disease--diabetes, asthma, heart disease, hypertension. Then we could decide what aspect we think might be a problem. How about assessment of how well they are doing when they come to the office? So, you review hemoglobin A1C and eye exams for a diabetic; staging, an action plan and correct meds for an asthmatic. Now what? Many of these are not in the electronic medical record. How would you assess them? After decades of wrestling with these issues, a whole system called quality improvement has been developed. 4What is Quality Improvement? Quality Improvement is a formal approach to the analysis of performance and systematic efforts to improve it. There are numerous models used. Some commonly discussed include