Data-Driven Approaches to Patient Safety and Quality of Care
Identify a quality improvement opportunity in your organization or practice. In a 1,250-1,500 word paper, describe the problem or issue and propose a quality improvement initiative based on evidence-based practice. Apply "The Road to Evidence-Based Practice" process, illustrated in Chapter 4 of your textbook, to create your proposal.
Include the following:
Provide an overview of the problem and the setting in which the problem or issue occurs.
Explain why a quality improvement initiative is needed in this area and the expected outcome.
Discuss how the results of previous research demonstrate support for the quality improvement initiative and its projected outcomes. Include a minimum of three peer-reviewed sources published within the last 5 years, not included in the Class Resources or textbook, that establish evidence in support of the quality improvement proposed.
Discuss steps necessary to implement the quality improvement initiative. Provide evidence and rationale to support your answer.
Explain how the quality improvement initiative will be evaluated to determine whether there was improvement.
Support your explanation by identifying the variables, hypothesis test, and statistical test that you would need to prove that the quality improvement initiative succeeded.
While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
Data-Driven Approaches to Patient Safety and Quality of Care
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Data-Driven Approaches to Patient Safety and Quality of Care
Quality improvement in healthcare is a concept that has attracted attention among scholars and practitioners for a long time. As such, some observers wonder why patient safety practices have not made delivery of care more effective, safe, timely, equitable, efficient, and patient-centered (Schroeder et al., 2019). However, multiple initiatives can be implemented towards the achievement of these objectives. In this paper, the quality improvement initiatives will be the use of data-driven approaches to improving patient safety and quality of care.
Problem Overview
All healthcare organizations strive to ensure the safety of patients during the delivery of care. According to Alotaibi and Federico (2017), patient safety can be described as a subset of healthcare that comprises avoiding, preventing, and ameliorating adverse injuries or outcomes emanating from the healthcare process. Medical errors are often a critical cause of these injuries and negative outcomes in the hospital settings, including operations, intensive care units, and hospitalization requires a prolonged stay in the hospital. Even simple procedures can be prone to errors. For instance, mistakes in prescriptions can cause the administration of the wrong drugs with adverse outcomes for a patient. The quality of care is another concept that usually accompanies patient safety since the quality is tied to the health outcomes. In this case, the quality dimension may comprise the positive experiences by a customer, including reduced waiting times, no medical errors, quick recovery, and successful operation. The conditions within the healthcare setting can also denote quality, including the food served, cleanliness of the facilities, and safety mechanisms.
Need for Quality Improvement Initiative
The data-driven approach to patient safety is an initiative that seeks to deploy some of the latest technologies for gathering and analyzing patient data to help improve the quality of care and safety of patients. Patient safety and service quality pose a problem since no organization has achieved perfection in this regard. Cascini et al. (2021) explained that substantial efforts had been made over the past two decades to improve these areas, but current estimates indicate massive gaps that need to be filled. Safety and quality problems can cause other broader challenges for a healthcare organization. For example, scandals and incidences can cause reputation damage and costly lawsuits and compensations.
The data-driven approach to safety and care quality also helps with the overall wellbeing of a hospital. Patient safety and service quality are critical success factors for modern healthcare organizations. Hospitals and related businesses compete for patients as ordinary commercial entities do. Quality and safety are two areas of competitiveness that can determine the success of a hospital. Managing patient risks and building on patient experience are considered essential pathways to success. Additionally, financial, operational, and clinical outcomes are boosted by this initiative, given that all data focuses on all critical success areas of care delivery. According to Cascini et al. (2021), even the most developed facilities often fail to deploy these pathways properly. Therefore, further deliberate efforts to improve healthcare remain a critical necessity.
Support from Previous Research
Past research has indicated that data-driven approaches to patient safety and quality of care are feasible solutions to the safety and quality gaps faced by hospitals. A study by Cascini et al. (2021) confirms that recent studies all show data-driven technologies have great potential and opportunity to help in this regard. Additionally, the study illustrates the functionality of a data-dri...