National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report
Latest available findings on quality of and access to health care
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Key Drivers
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EvidenceNOW: Tools and Resources
The Agency for Healthcare and Quality (AHRQ) offers practical, research-based tools and other resources to help a variety of health care origanizations, provider, and others make care safer in all health care settings. AHRQ's evidence-based tools and resources are used by organizations nationwide to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of health care. Improving health care quality by increasing the capacity of small primary care practices to implement the best clinical evidence is our aim. These tools and resources can be searched by the key drivers and the change strategies of the EvidenceNOW Key Driver Diagram.
Results
1 to 10 of 13 Tools and Resources DisplayedThis toolkit introduces the ABCS of heart health and provides checklists, action plans, and other instructions to guide primary care practices to implement evidence-based guidelines, transform health care delivery, and improve patients’ heart health.
This workflow shows how medical assistants can provide a check to ensure that evidence-based care is delivered by identifying patients with heart disease who, according to protocol, should have, but have not, been prescribed aspirin.
Primary care practices can use this Excel dashboard to calculate provider- and practice-level measures of blood pressure control, smoking cessation, and use of aspirin for heart disease as well as graph practice performance over time.
Practices can use this clinical flowchart to implement the 5As [ask, advise, assess, assist, arrange for follow-up] to help patients quit smoking, based on their readiness to quit.
Based on real-world experience, this manual guides primary care practices through the process of developing and implementing clinical decision support (CDS), from defining the project through implementation and sustaining improvements.
This resource provides an example of how a practice can translate evidence on treatment for hypertension (high blood pressure) into a protocol for the primary care team, highlighting the responsibilities medical assistants can take on.
In this podcast Dr. Jim Campbell, MD, who leads the Ohio Cardiovascular and Diabetes Health Collaborative, discusses the importance of involving patients in quality improvement projects. The podcast covers how practices can get started, ways to approach patients to participate, and strategies to keep them engaged.
Primary care practice staff can fill out this one-page checklist before a patient visit to highlight essential information about that patient’s ABCS status and flag upcoming care needs in the electronic health record (EHRs).
This case study of a primary care practice provides insight into the clinic’s quality improvement project to improve blood pressure control. It highlights the steps in the quality improvement (QI) process, future measures, and lessons learned.
This resource offers a set of the latest evidence-based changes to improve delivery of clinical interventions for the treatment of tobacco use and dependence.