Journal of general internal medicine
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Quality improvement (QI) methods represent a vehicle for fostering locally initiated innovation cycles. We partnered with palliative care services from seven diverse practice settings in India to foster locally initiated improvement projects. ⋯ Empowering local leaders and medical personnel to champion, design, and iterate using QI methods represents a promising powerful tool to spread palliative care services in developing countries.
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It is essential to high-quality medical care that life-sustaining treatment orders match the current, values-based preferences of patients or their surrogate decision-makers. It is unknown whether concordance between orders and current preferences is higher when a POLST form is used compared to standard documentation practices. ⋯ Nursing facility residents with POLST are significantly more likely than residents without POLST to have concordance between orders in their medical records and current preferences for life-sustaining treatments, increasing the likelihood that their treatment preferences will be known and honored. However, findings indicate further systems change and clinical training are needed to improve POLST concordance.
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Clinical Trial
Implementation Evaluation of a Complex Intervention to Improve Timeliness of Care for Veterans with Transient Ischemic Attack.
The Protocol-guided Rapid Evaluation of Veterans Experiencing New Transient Neurologic Symptoms (PREVENT) program was designed to address systemic barriers to providing timely guideline-concordant care for patients with transient ischemic attack (TIA). ⋯ The CFIR-guided bundle of implementation strategies facilitated the local implementation of the PREVENT QI program and was associated with clinical improvement in the national VA healthcare system.
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Failure of effective transitions of care following hospitalization can lead to excess days in the hospital, readmissions, and adverse events. Evidence identifies both patient and system factors that influence poor care transitions, yet health systems struggle to translate evidence into complex interventions that have a meaningful impact on care transitions. ⋯ Health systems need to address increasingly difficult challenges in care delivery. The use of evidence-based frameworks, such as the MRC framework, can guide systems to design complex interventions that respond to their local context and stakeholder needs.
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Measuring the health, economic, and cultural gains generated by scientific investments is crucial to reducing waste and improving quality of care. To date, there is no comprehensive framework for assessing the multi-faceted contributions of implementation and quality improvement sciences towards quality, cost, and patient and provider experiences in health systems. ⋯ The QUERI Impact Framework aligns multiple stakeholders at different levels of a health system around common metrics, which cross implementation science and quality improvement boundaries. The Framework supports a comprehensive assessment of the short-term and distal impacts of implementation efforts in a health system, allowing both research and operations leadership to understand the value of implementation and quality improvement investments to inform program and policy decisions.