Measuring the Success of a Patient Safety or Quality Improvement Project (Patient Safety VI)

Overview

How will you know if your patient safety and quality project is meeting its objectives? Peter Drucker once said “What gets measured, gets managed.” In this course, students will learn why measurement is critical to quality improvement work. Equally important, they will learn which data sources provide the most meaningful information and tools for how and where to locate them. Finally, students will learn how to interpret data from their patient safety and quality projects to guide and modify them during implementation to maximize their chances of making a difference for patients.

Syllabus

Performance Measurement in Patient Safety and Quality

In this module, learners will develop an understanding of what is performance measurement in healthcare, what constitutes a “good” performance measure, and basic frameworks that have been used for categorizing measures. Learners will become familiar with some of the well-known entities involved in performance measurement in healthcare and key challenges in the field.

Public Reporting of Performance Measures

In this module, learners will gain knowledge of the primary audiences for publicly reported performance measure sand some of the key measures that are currently reported. Learners will be exposed to some of the key websites that publicly report performance data and hear from a health system leader about some of the benefits and challenges of having a hospital’s quality and safety performance publicly available.

Interpreting Data and Telling Data's Story

In this module, learners will develop an understanding of the different tools that are available to analyze data used in quality and safety improvement work and how the data can be visualized for different audiences.Two case studies will be shared to demonstrate how these data analysis and visualization tools can be used in a real-life setting.

From Data to Action and Iteration

In this module, learners will be exposed to how mixed-methods research, which includes integrating qualitative and quantitative data together, can be used successfully in quality improvement projects.Learners will also become familiar with how data and measures are used to evaluate the success of a quality improvement project. Two case studies will be shared to demonstrate how these concepts have been used in real-life quality improvement projects.