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Evaluation
of Process and Effects of Change
Steps
for Using Data
to Improve Clinical Practice 5
Health care professionals may decide to take the following steps when using data to improve their clinical practices.
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Begin with curiosity about outcomes or a need to improve results.
- Try to avoid knee-jerk, obstructive criticism of proposed measurements. Instead, propose forward-directed solutions that are practical, goal-oriented, and good starting points.
- Gather baseline data on a small sample and check the findings.
- Try to change and improve the delivery process while gathering data.
- Plot results over time and analyze them by using a control chart or other graphical method. To see the way providers look at the effects of their interventions using run charts and make further decisions about continuing, amending, or discontinuing their actions click here.
- Refine understanding of variation in processes and outcomes by stratifying patients into subgroups and analyzing the results separately for each subgroup. For more information about stratification, click here.
- Make further changes while measuring key outcomes over time.
Information on Different Types of Measures
Source IHI www.ihi.org/IHI/Topics/ChronicConditions/Diabetes/Measures/
It is important to track three types of measures when working to improve the care of people with diabetes:
- Outcome Measures
These measures tell you whether changes are actually leading to improvement - that is, helping to achieve the overall aim of reducing complications and improving outcomes for patients with diabetes. Examples include reducing A1C to less than 7 for patients with diabetes.
- Process Measures
To affect the outcome measure of reducing A1C, you will make changes to improve many core processes - including the processes for self-management, decision support, clinical information systems, and delivery system design - as well as changes to improve the health care organization and community. Measuring the results of these process changes will tell you if the changes are leading to improved care for patients. Examples include the percentage of patients with two A1Cs in the last year and the percentage of patients with documented self-management goals.
- Balancing Measures
Use these measures to make sure that changes to improve one part of the system aren't causing new problems in other parts of the system.
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