Benchmark – Outcome and Process Measures

 Benchmark – Outcome and Process Measures

Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a planned organizational process to promote the continuous step-by-step improvement of clinical processes, patient care, and safety. Health providers plan and execute continuous practical improvements in patient care processes to achieve quality health care outcomes (McCalman et al., 2018). CQI aims to improve operations, systems processes, outcomes, and the work environment. CQI processes involve defining the issue, benchmarking, establishing a goal, followed by repeated quality improvement projects.  In this regard, this paper seeks to discuss process and outcome measures that can be employed for CQI, describe data collection for each measure, and solutions to the challenge.

Process Measures

Process measures are the particular interventions in a practice that contribute to a specific metric either positively or negatively. They denote the evidence-based interventions and best practices that a healthcare organization implements

to better patient care quality (Jazieh, 2020). Process measures signify what an organization or health providers do to improve or maintain clients’ health. They reflect the accepted clinical practice recommendations. Besides, they are used to establish the root cause of a problem in a health organization (Jazieh, 2020). Process measures that can be used for a CQI include the percentage of patients who are provided with discharge education and the percentage of elderly and frail patients who undertook a fall risk assessment.

Outcome Measures

Outcome measures are vital clinical and financial outcomes relevant to healthcare organizations. They are quality and cost targets that health organizations aim to promote improvement (Jazieh, 2020). Outcome measures indicate the effect of patient care interventions or health services on the health status of patients. An example of an outcome measure for a CQI is readmission rates.

Why Each Measure Was Chosen

            In the process measures, the metric on the percentage of patients provided with discharge education was selected because it influences patients’ self-care at home and health outcomes in the post-discharge phase. Discharge education provides patients and their families with essential information needed to effectively manage their health at home (Newnham et al., 2017). Lack of or inadequate discharge education is associated with ineffective self-care and lifestyle modification resulting in high emergency visits, readmissions, or comorbidities, which worsen the health outcomes. Newnham et al. (2017) assert that discharge education is mandated by the Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as essential measures for an organization to meet requirements for accreditation and public reporting.

The percentage of elderly and frail patients who undertook a fall risk assessment was selected because falls are a major cause of morbidity and prolonged patient stays. Providers must take measures to assess patients’ risk of falls in order to employ the appropriate measures to prevent falls (Slade et al., 2017). A fall risk assessment classifies a patient as a low, moderate, or high fall-risk. Therefore, every hospitalized elderly patient requires an assessment to establish the interventions to be instituted to prevent falls and subsequent injuries.

Readmission rates was selected as an outcome measure because they are costly yet preventable. Readmission rates reflect the quality of care provided in an organization. Thus, high readmission rates indicate a substandard quality of care, while low rates reflect high quality (Upadhyay et al., 2019).  Readmissions create a high burden to healthcare organizations and patients. In the United States, almost 20% of patients on Medicare get a readmission within 30 days after discharge, resulting in high costs of approximately $17billion annually (Upadhyay et al., 2019). Therefore, Efforts to reduce readmission rates in a hospital through CQI programs can save patients and healthcare organizations huge costs and promote better healthcare outcomes.

How Data Would Be Collected for Each Measure

            The data on the patients provided with discharge educat