3 Reasons to Digitize Quality Best-Practices in Healthcare

Quality best-practices in healthcare are critical and need to be widely implemented by healthcare providers for safer and better care. Organizations like the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and others offer education and training toolkits. They encourage quality improvement projects and keep fighting to get established best-practices implemented across hospitals and health systems.

Educating health professionals on quality is important, but digital tools are the real game changers. Here’s why.

1. They make adoption easier.

The benefits of quality best-practices are amazing, but can take some time to reap. Initially, adopting these practices may be perceived as additional burden on everyone. This means it’s hard to get buy-in. Technology can make the adoption of best practices much smoother, make them easier to implement and sustain.

• Standardized practices — specialized digital tools already have the methodology built-in. They don’t require long planning phases, which means everyone starts seeing results much faster.
• Improved experience — replacing paper forms, checklists and in-person meetings with digital interfaces that can be used by anyone any time. Personalization and gamification can be harnessed to reduce friction.
• Added value through technology — arranging information in a way that is easier to consume, making suggestions based on information from the past, remembering preferences, automating tasks: this is all possible when we go digital.
• Less manual inefficiencies — digitizing means we can automate the tedious parts of quality best practices (preparing, collecting, sending, notifying, sharing, arranging…), and focus on the important tasks.

2. They make documentation easier.

By digitizing practices we can make tracking, measuring, reporting and analytics automated and seamless. This is a big deal. Without measuring it’s very hard to improve quality. Reliable data collection and analytics is one of the biggest quality improvement challenges. Digital tools eliminate that challenge.

3. They make scaling easier.

QI (quality improvement) intervention is a strategy that attempts to reduce the disparity between the processes and outcomes from everyday clinical treatment practices and those that could be attained by implementing evidence-based best practices. Quality is achieved by analyzing and measuring performance by compliance to a standard quality measure.

CDC, Evaluating Quality Improvement Interventions

Quality improvement interventions are often extremely promising when researched, but they rarely take into consideration scaling the intervention within hospitals and across health systems. This means the results show incredible potential value for patients, clinicians and health systemes. And then… nothing happens.

Standardizing practices is not only a question of value for patients, clinicians and hospitals. It’s also a question of how much effort/cost is involved in implementing and scaling the practice in daily operations.

This is where digital tools shine.

• Good digital tools are easy to implement and scale. They allow friendly remote onboarding of users, streamline support, can integrate to other hospital systems and make scaling and standardizing smooth.
• Digitizing opens the door to 3rd party vendor products, which shifts the ongoing maintenance, support, integration and scaling burden to the vendors. This saves time for both clinicians and IT departments, and makes quality affordable and highly scalable.
• It also lowers the barrier for getting disruption started. Digital quality tools can be implemented in days and yield quick wins. This means amazing quality is within reach for any healthcare provider anywhere.

If you want to learn more about digitizing perioperative quality, visit www.chiefyteam.com or connect with us on twitter | linkedIn.