Competencies

In this project, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following competencies:

• Analyze healthcare quality metrics
• Determine an opportunity for a healthcare improvement initiative
• Recommend a healthcare quality improvement initiative and evaluation process

Overview

Throughout this course, you have learned how to analyze healthcare quality metrics, determine an opportunity for a healthcare improvement initiative, and recommend a healthcare quality improvement implementation plan and evaluation process. In this project, you will demonstrate the knowledge and skills needed to improve healthcare delivery for an organization. Choose a clinically or non-clinically based healthcare organization that releases public-facing data. You may decide to select a local organization or one where you work or have been a patient. For this project, you will be creating a healthcare quality improvement initiative and evaluation report in which you will describe the issue at the outset, the setting, the problem to be solved, the parties affected, and the reason why the issue is important to address. You will recommend a concise implementation plan and describe in detail how you plan to evaluate if your implementation was successful.

Scenario

For the purposes of this project, imagine that you work on a team that monitors quality and risk management within the organization you selected. Whether you are coming from a nursing lens or a healthcare administration lens, your task is to analyze the healthcare quality metrics for the organization you selected. Based upon your analysis of the data, you will determine an opportunity for a healthcare improvement initiative for the organization. Then, you will provide a recommendation so that the organization can improve the quality and/or safety of its healthcare delivery. Finally, describe how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your plan.

Directions

Your report should contain the following sections:

1. Metric analysis: Analyze the healthcare quality metrics of your chosen healthcare organization based on their public data.
   1. Interpret the data and metrics related to the effectiveness of a healthcare organization.
   2. Assess the validity and quality of the healthcare quality improvement data that support the need for the improvement opportunity you will include in your report.
   3. Derive insights and opportunities from the data.
2. Opportunity for improvement: Determine an opportunity for a healthcare quality improvement initiative for the healthcare organization you selected.
   1. Explain how the metrics drive an opportunity for improvement.
   2. Determine an evidence-based quality improvement tool for addressing an improvement opportunity.
   3. Apply a problem-solving framework or tool to identify what could have been done differently based on the metrics and show and/or describe your application of the tool or framework.
3. Recommendation: Provide a recommendation for the organization you selected so that the organization can improve the quality and/or safety of its healthcare delivery and determine how to evaluate if your recommendations were successful.
   1. Develop a healthcare quality improvement initiative using a framework, such as plan-do-study-act (PDSA), root cause analysis (RCA), and failure mode effect analysis (FMEA).
   2. Determine an evaluation method for a healthcare quality improvement initiative for 1, 3, 6, and 12 months and describe that method in detail.
   3. Determine data-collection tool(s).