Continuing to Improve
Tools for practice improvement, quality improvement, practice facilitation, and measurement
- Explicit and Standardized Prescription Medicine Instructions improve patients’ understanding, and possibly reduce errors while improving adherence. These tested instructions for pills simplify complex medicine regimens by using standard time periods for administration. These instructions have also been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
- Health Assessments in Primary Care: A How-to Guide for Clinicians and Staff. This guide provides a framework and practical evidenced-based guidance for primary care teams to adopt and successfully implement health assessments in primary care practices.
- Modules for clinicians to earn board-specific recertification—Health Assessment Recertification Project for Diversely Trained Clinicians (MOC Part IV & PA-QI)
- Confidential Physician Feedback Reports: Designing for Optimal Impact on Performance. This guide informs developers of feedback reports about evidence-based strategies to consider when developing or refining a feedback reporting system.
- Will It Work Here? A Decisionmaker's Guide to Adopting Innovations can help you determine if an innovation would be a good fit—or an appropriate stretch—for your health care organization by asking a series of questions. It links users to actionable Web-based tools and presents case studies that illustrate how other organizations have addressed these questions.
- Using Health Information Technology to Support Quality Improvement in Primary Care. This white paper describes factors that support the use of health information technology (IT) for quality improvement (QI) in primary care, for use by practice facilitators and other quality improvement “agents” to help them optimize practices’ health IT capabilities for QI purposes as well as for clinical care.
- Improving Your Office Testing Process A Toolkit for Rapid-Cycle Patient Safety and Quality Improvement provides information and resources to help physicians' offices, clinics, and other ambulatory care facilities assess and improve the testing process in their offices.
- Primary Care Practice Facilitation Curriculum. This curriculum is designed to assist in the training of new practice facilitators (also known as practice coaches, quality improvement coaches, or practice enhancement assistants) as they begin to develop the knowledge and skills needed to support meaningful improvement in primary care practices. Practice facilitation is an evidence-based approach to quality improvement in primary care practices.
- A How-To Guide on Developing and Running a Practice Facilitation Program (PDF, 3 MB). This guide is for organizations interested in starting a practice facilitation program designed to with primary care practices on quality improvement activities, with an emphasis on primary care redesign and transformation. It is intended for organizations or individuals who will develop, design, and administer such programs.
- Using Health Information Technology to Support Quality Improvement in Primary Care. This white paper describes factors that support the use of health information technology (IT) for quality improvement (QI) in primary care, for use by practice facilitators and other quality improvement "agents" to help them optimize practices’ health IT capabilities for QI purposes as well as for clinical care.
- National Quality Measures ClearinghouseTM. The NQMC mission is to provide detailed information on evidence-based healthcare quality measures, and to further their dissemination, implementation, and use in order to inform health care decisions.
- Primary Care Measures: Resources for Research and Evaluation. Searchable databases to explore frameworks for measurement, and to identify and compare measures within 4 areas that are critical to primary care improvement: Care Coordination, Clinical-Community Relationships, Team-Based Care, and Integrated Behavioral Health Care.
- Care Coordination Measures Database/Atlas provides comprehensive profiles of existing measures of care coordination, organizes those measures along two dimensions (domain and perspective), and presents a framework for understanding care coordination measurement, to which the measures are mapped. This framework incorporates elements from other proposed care coordination frameworks and is designed to support development of the field. Users of the CCMD can compare more than 90 validated care coordination measurement tools to identify and select those that are most appropriate for their research and evaluation needs.
