In 300 words or less respond to the post 1 below In your response, please provide a link to one additional resource (a scholarly article, white paper, blog post, or other type of media) that supports their conclusions.

Post #!

• What has proven effective/ineffective historically?

Quality improvement efforts can be complex due to the nature of healthcare being highly variable across providers, patients, settings of care, and across organizations. A well-known example of a quality improvement effort is Meaningful Use which can be viewed as both effective and ineffective. What Meaningful Use did a great job with was getting data into EMR’s in a more streamlined approach (i.e. the data sets required for patient demographics). It also increased the number of physicians utilizing Health IT in their practice across all settings of care. On the other side, there are those that view Meaningful Use as ineffective, questioning the value of the data that is now in the EMR, which is why we now see healthcare transitioning from the Meaningful Use program to MACRA where a patients outcomes will be measured rather than specific data elements in a system. This will require organizations to not only continue with the data collection Meaningful Use has made us accustomed to, but now taking that a step further and identifying how we can use that data to make patients and populations healthier as a whole.

• What are key components to a successful improvement program?

Accoriding to a healthcare analytics firm, rather than having individual qualiity improvement projects, each effort should complement the other in some form and be a part of a larger performance program (Brown, 2014). Furthermore, leveraging analytics is paradigm in a successful program. The figure below shows eight levels of analytic intervention with each building off one another and providing more value as a program moves up levels. Health systems are in varying levels of analytics, however, a strong analytic framework can provide detailed data to formulate improvement programs from, monitor progress and identify risks, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for both the provider and the patient.

• What are signs and symbols of a mature, successful program?

According to the Institute of Medicine, four key principles are evident in successful quality improvement programs

(HRSA, 2011):

• QI work as systems and processes – an organization must understand it’s current systems, processes, resources, activities, and outputs
• Focus on patients – the areas for improvement should focus on poor patient outcomes or patient dissatisfactions and how an organization can improve on those
• Focus on being part of the team – an all hands approach, each step in the process influences the next and this should be a team effort to see improvement
• Focus on use of the data – as mentioned above, use data to drive all areas of a quality improvement program and rely on data to prove its effectiveness