National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report
Latest available findings on quality of and access to health care
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Key Drivers
Change Strategies
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
21 to 30 of 43 Tools and Resources DisplayedThis 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 modifiable flow chart allows practices to adapt steps to reflect the practice’s preferred protocol for controlling hypertension in adult patients, including blood pressure goals and medication names.
This comprehensive implementation guide discusses why real-time, in-person huddles are beneficial for practice team communication, explains how to implement effective huddles, and provides case studies as examples.
This tool provides a brief overview of primary care team huddles, as well as a worksheet to help practices identify the goals of huddles, huddle topics and processes, and obstacles to huddling and their solutions.
Standing orders allow patient care to be shared among non-clinician members of the care team. This overview explains how standing orders empower both clinical and non-clinical staff and provides examples of standing orders.
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).
Based on Lean structured problem-solving methods, this tool uses root cause analysis, diagramming process changes, and measuring implementation progress and effectiveness of changes to help primary care practices maximize efficiency and good outcomes.
This primer includes short descriptions of the following continuous quality improvement (QI) approaches: Model for Improvement, Lean, Six Sigma, and the Baldridge Quality Model.
This tool provides a sample protocol for assigning new patients to primary care providers to maintain an organized patient panel. This empanelment process can be adapted as needed by practice staff.
This toolkit consists of 10 tools and templates—with instructions and examples—for primary care practices to use to improve quality. Tools include: cause and effect diagram, failure modes and effects analysis, histogram, Pareto chart, and scatter diagram.