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 12 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.
Part of an AHRQ curriculum used to train practice facilitators, this resource explains the fundamentals of building and working with quality improvement (QI) teams in primary care practices.
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.
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).
This practical guide shows practices how to start forming partnerships with patients and family advisors (PFAs) to improve primary care. It provides practice assessment, progress tracking, and PFA recruitment and selection tools.
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.