Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay

Deliver a 5–7-page analysis of an existing quality improvement initiative at your workplace. The QI initiative you choose to analyze should be related to specific disease, condition, or public health issue of personal or professional interest to you. Please include metrics with data from JACHO, AHRQ, CMS, CDC.

Too often, discussions about quality health care, care costs, and outcome measures take place in isolation—each group talking among themselves about results and enhancements.  Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay.Because nurses are critical to the delivery of high-quality, efficient health care, it is essential that they develop the proficiency to review, evaluate performance reports, and be able to effectively communicate outcome measures related to quality initiatives. The nursing staff\’s perspective and the need to collaborate on quality care initiatives are fundamental to patient safety and positive institutional health care outcomes.

Competency 2: Plan quality improvement initiatives in response to routine data surveillance.
Recommend additional indicators and protocols to improve and expand quality outcomes of a quality initiative.
Competency 3: Evaluate quality improvement initiatives using sensitive and sound outcome measures.
Analyze a current quality improvement initiative in a health care setting.
Evaluate the success of a current quality improvement initiative through recognized benchmarks and outcome measures.
Competency 4: Integrate interprofessional perspectives to lead quality improvements in patient safety, cost effectiveness, and work-life quality
Incorporate interprofessional perspectives related to initiative functionality and outcomes.
Competency 5: Apply effective communication strategies to promote quality improvement of interprofessional care.
Communicate evaluation and analysis in a professional and effective manner, writing content clearly and logically with the correct use of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Integrate relevant sources to support arguments, correctly formatting citations and references using the current APA style. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay.

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The Healthcare system is faced with several challenges such as preventable medical errors, delays in the discharge of patients, clinical variation, dwindling cash flow as well as hospital-acquired infections (Arfaras-Melainis et al., 2020). Although the healthcare system ought to consistently remain innovative to address such issues, the quality improvement initiatives do not deliver the return on investment. Therefore, to ensure the initiatives are effectively implemented and remain efficient, healthcare organizations should have a roadmap to assist and guide the successful implementation of the initiatives. The existing quality improvement initiative is the optimization of sepsis care to enhance and improve early recognition as well as outcomes.

Sepsis is perceived as a life-threatening condition resulting from infection and is a major driver of mortality in the United States. According to research, it shows that half of the hospital deaths are associated with this infection (Arfaras-Melainis et al., 2020). Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify sepsis early since the physical response of patient’s manifests as a symptom of non-specific symptoms, which tend to delay recognition, diagnosis as well as treatment, thus the spike in mortality rates. Evidently, sepsis presents a significant global health issue.

The existing quality improvement initiative uses comprehensive data-driven models to help in the identification of sepsis as well as standardizing the interventions and treatment. According to studies, about 1.5 million people get sepsis annually a condition that is life-threatening and detrimental to an individual’s health (Arfaras-Melainis et al., 2020). According to research one in three deaths occur in hospitals as a result of sepsis thus causing more than a quarter-million deaths every year. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay. The significance of optimizing sepsis will help determine early recognition and facilitate early recognition which will inform prompt responses and administering of treatment. Essentially, early detection helps in the establishment of guidelines about how to intervene and manage septic patients with proper interventions in the shortest time.

The need for quality and safety initiatives impact health care. Effective quality improvement initiatives help to achieve a degree to which health services given to patients and communities increase the chances of desired health outcomes and are in line with the present professional knowledge (Guy & Perlin,.2020). Therefore, the efforts to improve quality should be assessed and measured to evaluate whether the improvement efforts are leading to change in the primary endpoint in the set direction, contributing to undesired outcomes in various parts of the system ad if there is a need to add more efforts to enhance the processes. It is important to note that quality improvement strategies and initiatives tend to differ from research (Guy & Perlin,.2020). While research tries to address and assess the issues that lead to generalizable results, quality improvement initiatives comprise of small samples, regular changes in interventions as well as the adoption of new strategies that seem to be effective.

One model that can be used to expand quality outcomes of a quality initiative in healthcare, as the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA). This model has been widely used and it is characterized by the cyclical nature of influencing and assessing change, and it is mostly accomplished through the use of small and frequent PDSAs instead of designing large and slow ones (Guy & Perlin,.2020). Essentially, the role of the PDSA quality improvement protocol is to develop the functional and causal relationship between changes in systems and processes particularly capabilities and behavior as well as outcomes. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay. The cycle of PDSA begins with establishing the scope as well as the nature of the problem, identifying what changes should be made, planning for a particular change, the people to be involved, the aspects to be measured to assess the impact of change and where the strategy ought to be focussed.

The six sigma is the second quality indicator that can be used to expand the outcomes of the quality initiative since it involves improving, designing, and monitoring process to eliminate and minimize waste while maximizing satisfaction and boosting financial stability. Considering the adverse consequences of sepsis, healthcare systems need to work diligently to improve the early detection as well as treatment of septic patients (Martínez et al., 2020). It is important to note that patients with sepsis have a seventy-five percent length of stay as compared to those hospitalized with other conditions. Therefore, optimization of sepsis to enhance early detection will be a quality initiative that will help save people’s lives.

One of the areas of focus is early recognition in the emergency department since most cases of sepsis are present in this department (Martínez et al., 2020). Sadly, besides the plethora of research showing the importance of early detection, many healthcare institutions have not standardized an early recognition process. To identify sepsis, these institutions require a high degree of knowledge, awareness, and vigilance. Although difficult, it is possible to detect early. Some of the possible interventions to facilitate early intervention include: coming up with and implementing a standardized sepsis screening tool for patients, which can be as complex as an algorithm or as simple as a checklist. Also, creating and implementing an electronic sepsis alert as well as identification  (Martínez et al., 2020). Moreover, an organization can engage multidisciplinary staff in defining protocols, barriers as well as workflows, creation of visual cues to recognize patients who test positive for sepsis. Finally, the emergency department can be combined with critical care order sets and conducting frequent training, reviews, audit, and feedback. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay.

The existing initiative has performed well as a result of collaboration from all the stakeholders in healthcare. for instance, the data analysts have played a critical role in standardizing all sepsis-related issues in the institution (Martínez et al., 2020). Further, the emergency physicians, critical care physicians, nursing leadership, laboratory staff, and performance improvement professionals have played a huge role in the successful implementation of the current initiative.

Also, the performance has been realized in various units such as the intensive care, inpatient, medical doctors, emergency as well as the operational directors since they can easily access real-time applicable information to help in the enhancement of early detection of sepsis.

Besides, this enables rapid treatment since therapy is normally initiated to help manage the situation and reduce mortality (Martínez et al., 2020). The benefit of interpersonal collaboration is, it improves patient experience, saves people’s lives, and care is given to patients while minimizing medical anomalies. The delivery processes in healthcare encompass various interfaces as well as patient handoffs amidst several healthcare practitioners with different levels of education as well as occupational training.

In a typical healthcare institution, a patient can communicate with different employees including nurses, doctors, technicians among others. Therefore, part of effective clinical practice is too critical information is always relayed (Raju et al., 2020). Ideally, team collaboration is important. Incase healthcare professionals are not communicating well, usually, the patient’s safety is put in jeopardy. Essentially, patients are put at risk when they lack critical information, or information is misinterpreted when given unclear orders over the phone and having a change in status being overlooked.

Lack of communication in healthcare leads to medical errors and such anomalies have the potential to lead to injury or unexpected deaths. Thus, the need for collaboration in healthcare where professionals tend to assume complementary roles and intentionally work together while distributing and sharing the responsibility of problem-solving as well as decision making used to formulate and implement plans for patient care (Raju et al., 2020).. Essentially, a collaboration between healthcare professionals, physicians, and nurse’s boosts team member’s awareness of one another and the skills and knowledge required to improve outcomes.

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Collaboration is a powerful tool for communication. Some of the characteristics of effective teams include respect, trust, and collaboration (Schubel, et al., 2020). In most cases, these employees are usually tied to a common goal. In healthcare, the most applicable teamwork model is an interdisciplinary approach contrary to a multidisciplinary model which is characterized by each member being responsible for actions and activities that are related to their formalities, and disciplines and thus formulating separate goals for the patients. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay. However, the interdisciplinary approach focuses on a joint effort on behalf of the patients. Normally, all the disciplines are included in the care plan (Schubel, et al., 2020). Ideally, the pooling of specialized services results in having integrated interventions. Therefore, the plan of care comprises several evaluations and treatment regimens and it is designed to offer an individualized care program that best deals with the needs of the patient. This model is beneficial to the patient since they find communication to be easier while working with a cohesive team instead of having numerous professionals who are not versed with what others are doing to help and manage the patient

References

Arfaras-Melainis, A., Polyzogopoulou, E., Triposkiadis, F., Xanthopoulos, A., Ikonomidis, I., Mebazaa, A., & Parissis, J. (2020). Heart failure and sepsis: practical recommendations for the optimal management. Heart failure reviews, 25(2), 183-194.

Guy, J. S., Jackson, E., & Perlin, J. B. (2020). Accelerating the Clinical Workflow Using the Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT) Tool for Real-Time Clinical Monitoring. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, 1(3).

Martínez, M. L., Plata-Menchaca, E. P., Ruiz-Rodríguez, J. C., & Ferrer, R. (2020). An approach to antibiotic treatment in patients with sepsis. Journal of Thoracic Disease, 12(3), 1007.

Raju, V., Pournami, F., Nandakumar, A., Prabhakar, J., & Jain, N. (2020). Improving Microbe Detection and Optimizing Antibiotic Use in Neonatal Sepsis With Multiplex Polymerase Chain Reaction: A Comparative Cohort Study. Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice, 28(3), 142-146.

Schubel, L., Mosby, D. L., Blumenthal, J., Capan, M., Arnold, R., Kowalski, R., … & Littlejohn, R. (2020). Informatics and interaction: Applying human factors principles to optimize the design of clinical decision support for sepsis. Health Informatics Journal, 26(1), 642-651. Quality Improvement Initiative Evaluation Essay.