Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)
Learn how five organizations have made a business case for addressing disparities in health care quality and access. Organizations such as hospitals, health plans, health systems, and others may see their own motivations and challenges reflected in these examples. These case studies increase the evidence base for health organizations in support of building a business case to reduce health disparities.
Patient Safety Movement
Failures of airway management (e.g., inability to mask ventilate or oxygenate, unplanned extubation, failure to intubate) are major causes of inpatient morbidity and mortality. The following steps will establish an institutional,
team-based, comprehensive and sustainable system for reliability in airway management.
Jhpiego, Johns Hopkins University Affiliate
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
The Toolkit To Improve Safety for Mechanically Ventilated Patients helps hospitals make care safer for mechanically ventilated patients in intensive care units (ICUs). ICU staff can use the toolkit to apply the proven principles and methods of AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) to reduce complications for patients on ventilators. Such complications include ventilator-associated pneumonia, which affects as many as 20 percent of patients who are on a ventilator for more than 48 hours. The toolkit includes resources used by hospitals that participated in the AHRQ Safety Program for Mechanically Ventilated Patients project.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
The Toolkit To Promote Safe Surgery helps perioperative and surgical units in hospitals identify opportunities to improve care and safety practices and implement evidence-based interventions to prevent surgical site infections. The toolkit has evidence-based, practical resources that reflect the real-world experiences of the frontline clinicians and subject matter experts who participated in the AHRQ Safety Program for Surgery, a national implementation project in which approximately 200 hospitals participated and successfully reduced surgical site infections. It builds on AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) and the core CUSP toolkit by providing specific tools focused on the surgical setting to help hospitals reduce surgical site infections and other complications. This toolkit focuses on surgery in hospitals
Co-authored by Deloitte & Joint Commission Resources
The whitepaper catalogues a broad array of lessons learned identified during the period of March through August 2020. These lessons learned are based on discussions with a diverse group of health care leaders; assessments of readiness/preparedness efforts across national, regional and local stakeholders; and a review of public documents. The considerations in this whitepaper include observed best practices adopted by organizations throughout the COVID-19 response. For each health care domain and associated issues, it lays out specific actions that organizations have taken to address them and provides access to guidance and tools that health care leaders can use to create and enact their own plan to address these challenges. Some of the wide array of health care domains covered in this in-depth resource include:
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
Presentation Overview:
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
You can redesign your care system through technical and adaptive work to improve patient safety and eliminate preventable harm. Technical work focuses on procedural aspects of care that can be explicitly defined, such as the evidence to support a specific intervention or the definition for a ventilator-associated event (VAE). Adaptive work targets the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of the people who deliver care. The five-step CUSP process brings adaptive work into the change process and helps your team improve your unit’s safety culture. By integrating CUSP with technical interventions, your team can achieve real and sustainable improvements in safety.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Research shows that when patients are engaged in their health care, it can lead to measurable improvements in safety and quality. To promote stronger engagement, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) developed a guide to help patients, families, and health professionals work together as partners to promote improvements in care. This guide focuses on four primary strategies for promoting patient/family engagement in hospital safety and quality of care:
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
This resource reviews approaches to the diagnosis of sepsis, describes approaches to empiric treatment of sepsis, supports the recognition of when to stop and narrow antibiotic therapy in patients with suspected sepsis and discusses durations of therapy for patients with sepsis.
Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)
Focused quality improvement efforts should be targeted to populations at risk for disparities. Explore this guide for resources and concepts key to addressing disparities and improving health care quality throughout your organization.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)
Learn how to identify, prioritize, and take action on health disparities by championing the Disparities Impact Statement in your organization. Participants receive personalized technical assistance focused on
strengthening your quality improvement program through a series of consultations from subject matter experts.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
These guidelines have been developed for healthcare personnel who insert intravascular catheters and for persons responsible for surveillance and control of infections in hospital, outpatient, and home healthcare settings. The guidelines provide a summary of recommendations to prevent Intravascular Catheter-Related Infections.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
Provides examples resources on implementing the CDC Targeted Assessment for Prevention (TAP) strategy to prevent CLABSI.
Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)
The purpose of this toolkit is to enable organizations to implement the National CLAS Standards and improve health equity. It is organized according to the enhanced National CLAS Standards, and provides practical tools and examples of CLAS, in addition to efforts to implement the National CLAS Standards that can be adapted for use by health care organizations. It is intended for organizations that have already decided to pursue CLAS, to improve equity and eliminate health care disparities.
