Question

Assume that you have recently been hired as the special assistant to the chief executive officer (CEO) of your health care organization, Thunder Hospital. Your duty is to head up the new quality improvement department. Over the last year, the hospital has experienced substantial growth but is also facing a number of patient safety concerns, including a steady increase in medical errors and a 25% rise in hospital-acquired infections. Based upon what you have learned in this course, prepare a quality improvement plan to present to the CEO with strategies for addressing these issues.

In a 1,000-1,250-word proposal, include the following:

1. Identify the issues the hospital is currently facing and how they are affecting quality outcomes and endangering patients.
2. Present a detailed plan to improve quality and elaborate on how it aligns with the hospital’s initiatives to improve value-added health care. Discuss the quality improvement tool you suggest using to locate and ameliorate problem areas, as well as the roles and responsibilities of involved stakeholders, financial considerations for the implementation of your proposal, the goals of the plan, and methods for evaluating its success.
3. Examine the effects that the implementation of this proposal will have upon administrators, clinicians, and physicians. Explore possible challenges that could arise with stakeholders reacting negatively to changes presented by this proposed plan. What strategies or preventive measures could be put in place to reduce the friction between various health care providers?
4. How will your plan improve overall quality for Thunder Hospital? How will the improvements your plan suggests implementing now set the hospital up to continue providing quality care in the future?

Answer 1

1.Identification of issues the hospital is currently facing

Financial challenges and hospital productivity,Maintaining patient safety,Regulatory standards and emerging energy mandates,Hospital security,Patient satisfaction

how they are affecting quality outcomes:availability of resources, patient cooperation and collaboration among providers affect the quality of medical services and patient outcomes. Patient socio- demographic variables,Patient cooperation,Patient illness (severity of illness),Physician socio- demographic variables,Physician competence (Knowledge and skills)

How hospitals are endangering patients.

exploitation of hospital cleaners and food service workers to the spread of viruses, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other deadly pathogens.

plan to improve quality and elaborate on how it aligns with the hospital’s initiative to improve value-added health care.

Pharmacist-led Medication Therapy Management Reduces Total Cost of Care,Optimizing Sepsis Care Improves Early Recognition and Outcomes,Boosting Readiness and Change Competencies Key to Successfully Reducing Clinical Variation,New Generation Activity-Based Costing Accelerates Timeliness of Decision Support, Systematic, Data-Driven Approach Lowers Length of Stay and Improves Care Coordination and Clinical and Financial Partnership Reduces Denials

quality improvement tools of healthcare are

IHI global trigger tool,SBAR tool etc

Stakeholders are Board Members,Chief Executive Officer,Chief Medical Information Officer:help set overall organizational agenda (including quality/safety focus), improvement priorities, resource allocation

Quality Officer,IT/Informatics Leadership,Pharmacy Director,VP/Director of Nursing:Organized medical staff ,Cross-cutting functions (for example, quality, safety, disease management, case managers, risk management) ,Clinical director of information systems/medical informatics

effects that the implementation of this proposal will have upon administrators, clinicians, and physicians

The implementation of the policy to address these “never events” will have a negative financial impact on institutions that mismanage patient care. Pharmacists and other clinicians have the opportunity to broaden their roles on health care teams and, potentially, their scope of practice through these various ACA-mandated initiatives.

possible challenges that could arise with stakeholders reacting negatively to changes presented by this proposed plan.

Stakeholders are investors who invest their shares in the healthcare sector,challenges are they need to understand the perspective of each and every plan set up in the process with full patience,they need to appoint somebody so that he/she can check the quality and quantity and report it to them on monthly basis or daily basis in meetings so that they can get the idea what is happening.They also have to propose some ideas and they have to collect the update from the hospitals on day to day basis.

plan improve overall quality for Thunder Hospital? How will the improvements your plan suggests implementing now set the hospital up to continue providing quality care in the future?

Pharmacist-led Medication Therapy Management Reduces Total Cost of Care,Optimizing Sepsis Care Improves Early Recognition and Outcomes,Boosting Readiness and Change Competencies Key to Successfully Reducing Clinical Variation,New Generation Activity-Based Costing Accelerates Timeliness of Decision Support, Systematic, Data-Driven Approach Lowers Length of Stay and Improves Care Coordination and Clinical and Financial Partnership Reduces Denials