scholarly journals Understanding challenges of using routinely collected health data to address clinical care gaps: a case study in Alberta, Canada

2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. e001491
Author(s):  
Taylor McGuckin ◽  
Katelynn Crick ◽  
Tyler W Myroniuk ◽  
Brock Setchell ◽  
Roseanne O Yeung ◽  
...  

High-quality data are fundamental to healthcare research, future applications of artificial intelligence and advancing healthcare delivery and outcomes through a learning health system. Although routinely collected administrative health and electronic medical record data are rich sources of information, they have significant limitations. Through four example projects from the Physician Learning Program in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, we illustrate barriers to using routinely collected health data to conduct research and engage in clinical quality improvement. These include challenges with data availability for variables of clinical interest, data completeness within a clinical visit, missing and duplicate visits, and variability of data capture systems. We make four recommendations that highlight the need for increased clinical engagement to improve the collection and coding of routinely collected data. Advancing the quality and usability of health systems data will support the continuous quality improvement needed to achieve the quintuple aim.

Author(s):  
Joia S. Mukherjee

Quality data are necessary to make good decisions in health delivery for both individuals and populations. Data can be used to improve care and achieve equity. However, systems for health data management were historically weak in most impoverished countries. Health data are not uncommonly compiled in stacks of poorly organized paper records. Efforts to streamline and improve health information discussed in this chapter include patient-held booklets, demographic health surveys, and the use of common indicators. This chapter also focuses on the evolution of medical records, including electronic systems. The use of data for monitoring, evaluation, and quality improvement is explained. Finally, this chapter reviews the use of frameworks—such as logic models and log frames—for program planning, evaluation, and improvement.


2021 ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
Joia S. Mukherjee

Quality data are necessary to make good decisions in health delivery, for both individuals and populations. Data can be used to improve care and achieve equity. However, the collection of health data has been weak in most impoverished countries, where health data are compiled in stacks of poorly organized paper records. Efforts to streamline and improve health information discussed in this chapter include patient-held booklets, demographic health surveys, and the use of common indicators. This chapter also focuses on the evolution of medical records, including electronic systems. The use of data for monitoring, evaluation, and quality improvement is explained. Finally, this chapter reviews the use of frameworks—such as logic models and log frames—for program planning, evaluation, and improvement.


Author(s):  
Ami R. Moore ◽  
Cassie Hudson ◽  
Foster Amey ◽  
Neale Chumbler

Reporting healthcare quality has become an important factor in healthcare delivery. Prior research has shown that patient-consumers do not frequently use information on websites reporting physician quality to guide their choice of physicians. Our aim is to understand the contextual and personal characteristics that influence patient-consumers’ decisions to trust or ignore information sources about healthcare quality. We use data from Finding Quality Doctors: How Americans Evaluate Provider Quality in the US, 2014, to examine factors that explain trust in sources reporting healthcare quality provided by physicians. Using factor analysis, 3 overarching information sources were identified: (1) employers and healthcare providers; (2) user advocacy sources; and (3) insurance companies and government. We use multiple regression analysis to understand the factors that impact trust in these 3 information sources. Our study found that contrary to previous findings, health status was not a significant factor that affects trust in sources reporting care quality data. Also, age was the only factor that significantly correlated with trusting information from all 3 sources. Specifically, younger adults trusted information from all sources compared to older adults. Furthermore, political affiliation, employment status, income, and area of residence correlated with trusting care quality information from either companies and government agencies or family and social network sources. Results suggest that individual and contextual characteristics are significant factors in trusting information sources regardless of health status and these should be taken into consideration by those promoting public reporting of healthcare quality information.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Maners ◽  
Eric Bakow ◽  
Michael D. Parkinson ◽  
Gary S. Fischer ◽  
Geoffrey R. Camp

Addressing patient health and care behaviors that underlie much of chronic disease continues to challenge providers, medical practices, health systems, and insurers. Improving health and care as described by the Quadruple Aim requires innovation at the front lines of clinical care: the doctor–patient interaction and office practice. This article describes the use of Lean Six Sigma in a quality improvement (QI) effort to design an effective and scalable method for physicians to prescribe health coaching for healthy behaviors in a primary care medical home within a large integrated delivery and financing system. Building on the national Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation–funded Prescription for Health multisite demonstration, this QI case study provides important lessons for transforming patient–physician–practice support systems to better address lifestyle and care management challenges critical to producing better outcomes.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. e045520
Author(s):  
Marie-Pierre Codsi ◽  
Philippe Karazivan ◽  
Ghislaine Rouly ◽  
Marie Leclaire ◽  
Antoine Boivin

ObjectivesTo understand identity tensions experienced by health professionals when patient partners join a quality improvement committee.DesignQualitative ethnographic study based on participatory observation.SettingAn interdisciplinary quality improvement committee of a Canadian urban academic family medicine clinic with little previous experience in patient partnership.ParticipantsTwo patient partners, seven health professionals (two family physicians, two residents, one pharmacist, one nurse clinician and one nurse practitioner) and three members of the administrative team.Data collectionData collection included compiled participatory observations, logbook notes and semi-structured interviews, collected between the summer of 2017 to the summer of 2019.Data analysisGhadiri’s identity threats theoretical framework was used to analyse qualitative material and to develop conceptualising categories, using QDA Miner software (V.5.0).ResultsAll professionals with a clinical care role and patient partners (n=9) accepted to participate in the ethnographic study and semi-structured interviews (RR=100%). Transforming the ‘caregiver–patient’ relationship into a ‘colleague–colleague’ relationship generated identity upheavals among professionals. Identity tensions included competing ideals of the ‘good professional’, challenges to the impermeability of the patient and professional categories, the interweaving of symbols associated with one or the other of these identities, and the inner balance between the roles of caregiver and colleague.ConclusionThis research provides a new perspective on understanding how working in partnership with patients transform health professionals’ identity. When they are called to work with patients outside of a simple therapeutic relationship, health professionals may feel tensions between their identity as caregivers and their identity as colleague. This allows us to better understand some underlying tensions elicited by the arrival of different patient engagement initiatives (eg, professionals’ resistance to working with patients, patients’ status and remuneration, professionals’ concerns toward patient ‘representativeness’). Partnership with patients imply the construction of a new relational framework, flexible and dynamic, that takes into account this coexistence of identities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002203452110202
Author(s):  
F. Schwendicke ◽  
J. Krois

Data are a key resource for modern societies and expected to improve quality, accessibility, affordability, safety, and equity of health care. Dental care and research are currently transforming into what we term data dentistry, with 3 main applications: 1) medical data analysis uses deep learning, allowing one to master unprecedented amounts of data (language, speech, imagery) and put them to productive use. 2) Data-enriched clinical care integrates data from individual (e.g., demographic, social, clinical and omics data, consumer data), setting (e.g., geospatial, environmental, provider-related data), and systems level (payer or regulatory data to characterize input, throughput, output, and outcomes of health care) to provide a comprehensive and continuous real-time assessment of biologic perturbations, individual behaviors, and context. Such care may contribute to a deeper understanding of health and disease and a more precise, personalized, predictive, and preventive care. 3) Data for research include open research data and data sharing, allowing one to appraise, benchmark, pool, replicate, and reuse data. Concerns and confidence into data-driven applications, stakeholders’ and system’s capabilities, and lack of data standardization and harmonization currently limit the development and implementation of data dentistry. Aspects of bias and data-user interaction require attention. Action items for the dental community circle around increasing data availability, refinement, and usage; demonstrating safety, value, and usefulness of applications; educating the dental workforce and consumers; providing performant and standardized infrastructure and processes; and incentivizing and adopting open data and data sharing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. S413-S414
Author(s):  
Aldo Martinez ◽  
Deborah Parilla ◽  
Melissa Green ◽  
Anne Murphy ◽  
Sylvia Suarez-Ponce ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Urinary tract infections (UTIs) account for 34% of all healthcare-associated infections (HAI). Urinary catheters (UC) are placed in 15–25% of hospitalized patients and >75% of HAI UTIs are UC-related. Bacteria introduced via UC can colonize the bladder within 3 days. So, the greatest risk factor for acquiring a catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) is prolonged use of indwelling UC. Nursing (RN) staff noted inconsistency with appropriate use of UC and commonly UC remained in place well after their original indication had expired. Methods As part of a multi-faceted approach for quality improvement and patient safety, we rolled out an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)-based initiative to reduce UC days/Standardized Utilization Ratio (SUR). Daily critical reviews of the indication for UC were conducted by two groups. First, frontline night shift RN staff identified patients who no longer had a valid justification for continued UC. They handed-off the information to day-shift RNs, who recommend removal of UC during daily rounds with the physician teams. A second review was performed by Clinical Quality Improvement Specialists (CQIS) based on defined criteria from our nursing decatheterization protocol. Their discontinue UC recommendations were also sent to the care teams. The critical reviews of UC for CAUTI reduction started with 4 ICUs in August 2018, with additional ICUs added in December, January and March. Monthly UC SURs were tracked Results Figure 1 shows the number of UCs recommended for removal by RNs vs. CQIS (bars), as well as the percent discordance between RNs and CQIS (line). CQIS identified many more removable UCs than the RNs (888 vs. 256). 211 UC were removed after RN recommendations, and an additional 386 UCs were removed as a result of the CQIS audits. Figure 2 shows the marked corresponding decline in our SUR over this intervention. Conclusion As more units participated in the initiative, we saw increasing numbers of “discontinue UC” recommendations. Over time there was also a moderate decrease in the discordance between RN and CQIS recommendations for UC removal. CQIS routinely identified many more UCs to be removed compared with RNs, and more than doubled the number of discontinued UC. Notably, the UC SUR markedly improved, decreasing from 0.98 to 0.78. Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.


2016 ◽  
Vol Volume 8 ◽  
pp. 389-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Nicholls ◽  
Sinead Langan ◽  
Henrik Toft Sørensen ◽  
Irene Petersen ◽  
Eric Benchimol

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