QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
Transforming health care and outcomes for children with rare diseases is difficult within the current health care system. Discovery and improvement is often limited by small numbers of patients at any one care center.
Individual care centers often do not have enough children with a specific congenital cardiac defect to achieve appropriate sample sizes for research or quality improvement activities, making partnerships between collaboration among multiple centers necessary.
To achieve the mission and vision of NPC-QIC, the collaborative uses quality improvement science, the IHI’s Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement, and the IHI's Model for Improvement (linked below) to improve care and redesign the system.
Successes and current progress of the collaborative are summarized in an Infographic that is updated quarterly. This infographic is one way we share some of our measurable outcomes.
NPC-QIC works with Care Centers to build QI capability and improve outcomes by:
Establishing a Best-Practices Infrastructure:
The network establishes an infrastructure of care best-practices, which Care Centers can rapidly implement without having to devote the time and money to develop their own QI systems and network to establish these best-practices on their own.
Providing QI Education and Coaching:
Our Quality Improvement leaders provide education and coaching about the QI processes as they pertain to HLHS including: Systems framework and improvement methods for testing and implementing improvements–within single care centers and across all NPC-QIC care centers.Fostering Collaboration Across Care Centers:
The network utilizes the “All teach, all learn” philosophy, hosts biannual learning sessions for the entire network community, and supports Improvement Framework Path 1, Path 2, and Path 3 Projects.
Managing Data:
The network hosts a secure, HIPAA-compliant data management infrastructure, including web-based data entry, data storage, reports, and data analyses.
Producing Shared Network Resources:
Through our QI work, collaboration, and research, we’re able to develop resources to be shared throughout the network, including an Interstage Change Package, the Single Ventricle Journey Guide, Growth Bundles, and more. See this page for a full list of shared network resources.
