In order to make improvements that lead to higher quality care, better patient outcomes, and enhanced professional development, many Canadian provinces have pushed for healthcare facilities to develop formal reports that outline quality improvement targets and activities.
In Ontario, Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are used to help healthcare facilities improve quality issues and achieve targets. These QIPs are vital as they outline the improvements made from the previous year, as well as goals and initiatives the organization is committed to.
As QIPs can be incredibly demanding, we’ve outlined some of the best ways to improve your annual Quality Improvement Plan:
1. Continuously monitor quality improvement
To ensure that a QIP is relevant and successfully executed, it is crucial that data is collected and evaluated on a regular basis.
Regular monitoring ensures that changes are resulting in improvement within the organization; Health Quality Ontario advises that it, “may mean setting up local data collection for the indicator using your electronic medical records system, and tracking other process measures by whatever means necessary.”
2. Review QIP resources
There are various resources available to help create the best QIPs. Health Quality Ontario has created multiple resources to help organizations successfully execute annual QIPs and boost quality improvement
From guidance documents to interactive forums, many of these resources provide examples and best practices for healthcare organizations to follow.
Other resources include external programs and software solutions that automatically measure organization performance to help remove the burden of data collection from front-end staff. These can be used to help set and measure goals for QIPs throughout the year.
3. Take advantage of the patient perspective
A key pillar for health quality in Ontario is ensuring that care is truly patient-centred; “Patient engagement is an essential way of incorporating the voices of patients and caregivers into decisions that will affect the care that patients receive”
One of the leading methods of gathering patients’ input for QIPs includes surveys. Patient surveys allow practices to take a deeper dive into the patient perspective and gather inputs from a larger pool of candidates in a shorter amount of time.
4. Create meaningful insights
Creating meaningful insights from the data gathered for QIPs is essential to enhancing the performance of healthcare organizations. As it is the most critical aspects of creating a QIP, it is also the most demanding.
With effective and analysis, practices can use QIPs to optimize costs and operations while increasing patient satisfaction and quality of care.
High-quality patient care stems from creating high-quality Improvement Plans. That being said, balancing constant data collection, thorough patient engagement, and resource reviews, all while trying to create meaningful insights, can be difficult.
There’s an easier way.
Use a software solution to automate your QIP process. Effortlessly send patient experience surveys and health promotion messaging without spending any time on data collection. By automating the process you can finally focus on creating better insights from data collected and improve your quality of care.
To learn about HQI, Cliniconex’s automated quality improvement tool, and other patient engagement solutions have a chat with our team today!