HealthyData Blog
In healthcare, there are so many regulations and technologies to stay current on. In our HealthyData blog, you will read everything from CMS meaningful use to EMR news, clinical best practices and QAPI program initiatives.
There are six key principles of the federal Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). PMI was a federal initiative announced by President Obama in 2015 and was incorporated into the 2016 budget. The mission statement for PMI is “to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that empower patients, researchers, and providers to work together toward development of individualized care.”
Our previous blogs on Quality Assessment and Process Improvement (QAPI) in this series have focused on designing objective measures and using those to monitor key aspects of our transplant programs. Today, we want to discuss what to do with those measures and how to translate them into successful process improvement projects.
In our last blog, we discussed the development of objective measures in your Quality Assessment and Process Improvement (QAPI) program and using a SMART approach as described by Doran in Management Review in 1981. Today, we are going to focus on some additional considerations and discuss how to manage these measures so as to yield demonstrable and actionable improvement through the use of process improvement projects.
The headline Medical Errors are the Third Leading Cause of Death is a popular title for a recent study that highlights the impact diagnostic errors can have on patients.
A web search turned up similar headlines every few years going back to the 1990’s. Clearly, not much has changed. There are still too many diagnostic errors and not enough has been done to reduce the carnage.
In our first blog of this series, we discussed the model framework for developing a Quality Assessment Process Improvement program. Today, we will discuss how to develop objective measures that are used in three of the aspects of the program, namely Feedback, Data Systems and Monitoring; Systematic Analysis and Systemic Action; and Performance Improvements. The directive to emplo y objective measures is provided in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Conditions of Participation (§482.96(a) Standard: Components of a QAPI Program) that states...
In our previous blogs, we have reviewed some aspects of transplant operations, how to stay compliant and how to address concerns raised by regulatory agencies such as the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) when issues arise. Our next series of blogs will focus on how transplant programs can proactively track their progress and address potential problems before theybecome major issues. During this series, we will review the structure, operations and tools of an effective Quality Assessment and Process Improvement Program (QAPI). First, let’s review the 5 aspects that create the conceptual framework for a QAPI program under the Medicare requirements.
Once again I had the pleasure of attending the 24th Annual UNOS Transplant Management Forum for my 4th time earlier this year. As always, it was a flurry of learning, knowledge-sharing, networking, and well-deserved awards for leaders in the industry.
It was as apparent this time as it was every time before, that the transplant community is a close-knit group who all struggle with similar things regardless of their geographical location. These struggles span across many areas, including financial, staffing, regulatory requirements, lack of organs, information technology, reporting, managing the constant deluge of paper, and many more. While I can't claim that Extract can help with all of these, there are two specific struggles that we excel at fixing: extracting discrete results from faxed external lab results and intelligently splitting, classifying, and filing large documents (such as referral packets) into patients' charts.
