National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report
Latest available findings on quality of and access to health care
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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 18 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.
This resource describes characteristics of high-functioning care teams and shares methods for helping teams improve their effectiveness. It details common challenges faced by primary care teams and how to solve them.
This resource shows how to design reports for quality improvement (QI) purposes, including different types of reports and different ways of generating them from electronic health records (EHRs). It includes checklists for finding data errors.
This resource explains the purpose and process of workflow mapping in a primary care setting. It includes important activities to map, questions to consider in workflow redesign, and tips for implementing and sustaining new workflows.
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 webinar, American Medical Association (AMA) staff discuss how primary care practices can implement each of the 7 steps for implementing self-measured blood pressure (SMBP): (1) Identify patients for SMBP; (2) Confirm device validation and cuff size; (3) Train patients; (4) Have patients perform SMBP; (5) Average results; (6) Interpret results; and (7) Document plans and communicate to patients.
This learning guide explains how to improve electronic health record (EHR) data quality to stimulate practice quality improvement.
A video story of Willie Morgan, a patient, who talks about the importance of working closely with his pharmacist to manage his chronic conditions. The Tennessee Heart Health Network disseminates patient stories in their newsletters to healthcare professionals and shares them with their Patient Advisory Councils to support patient engagement in quality improvement.
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).