The growth of patient visits and procedures performed in ambulatory health care facilities underscores the importance of examining and improving patient safety and providing better quality of care. The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) published a Quality Improvement in Ambulatory Care Toolkit to help facilities demonstrate their commitment to continuous quality improvement (QI) by developing an integrated QI program.
“Our QI Toolkit provides a step-by-step approach to help organizations develop and execute an effective QI strategy in alignment with AAAHC Standards,” said Noel Adachi, MBA, president and CEO of AAAHC. “This premium resource provides organizations with thought leadership and guidance on creating and enhancing an organization’s quality culture of serving patients while also building teamwork and improving communication among staff.”
AAAHC QI guidelines offer a comprehensive method to address known or suspected performance deficiencies in all areas of ambulatory care, such as clinical care outcomes, peer review, infection prevention and safety, patient satisfaction, and risk management, in an ongoing, systematic way. Organized into two parts, the toolkit provides an overview for assessing your QI program and implementing a comprehensive QI study.
First, the toolkit presents a QI program assessment, using a series of questions through which organizations review their current QI policies and procedures. The questionnaire provides actionable recommendations and insights to move organizations toward an integrated, organized, ongoing, data-driven and peer-based quality improvement (QI) program. The second part of the toolkit outlines AAAHC’s “10 Elements” for QI studies and guides organizations through the necessary components of a successful QI study, focusing on goal setting, data collection and analysis, corrective actions, remeasurement and communication.
“Many administrators view QI as data collection, but collecting data is just the beginning of the process,” said Cheryl Pistone, RN, MA, MBA, clinical director for AAAHC. “The toolkit helps health care organizations collect the right data, in a strategic and trackable way, and use it to build meaningful QI studies that solve problems and increase efficiency, aligning them with our 1095 Strong, quality every day philosophy.”
To order the AAAHC Quality Improvement in Ambulatory Care Toolkit, please visit www.aaahc.org/quality/patient-safety-toolkits/.
For information, visit www.aaahc.org.
