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.
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1 to 10 of 27 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.
A training checklist to ensure that staff have learned how to measure blood pressure accurately.
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.
It is important for primary care team members to feel they can ask for help, try new ways of doing things, and learn from mistakes. This resource provides suggestions for how practices can help quality improvers feel safe.
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 is an example template that could be adapted for use in your EHR to ensure a clear understanding of how the patient is monitoring and adhering to recommended treatment for their cardiovascular health, focused on hypertension, cholesterol, and smoking.
Practices can use this fillable Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) tool to design and test changes to improve health care quality. Using this form can be helpful to primary care practices following the Model for Improvement quality improvement approach.
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.
This Word worksheet helps primary care practices create action plans for implementing evidence. It has practices identify improvements they want to make; set measurable, realistic (i.e., SMART) goals; and list testable changes to achieve them.