Measuring + evaluating patients’ outcomes + experience
Opportunity
As part of i3’s goal to achieve outstanding health outcomes and patient experience, we are supporting clinicians to measure, evaluate and maximise their patients’ outcomes and experience. The i3’s three public health physicians are working closely with our Heads of Division of Surgery; Acute Medicine; Medicine Specialties and Older Persons; Child, Women and Family Services; and Mental Health and Addiction Services; and with Clinical Directors of specialty groups, to develop sets of clinical excellence metrics the clinicians have identified as important for understanding and improving their patients’ outcomes and experience.
Aim
Provide clinicians with timely access to meaningful data about the quality of care, unwarranted variation in care, safety of care, cost of care, patient reported outcomes, patient experience, operations and performance.
Intervention
Our public health physicians have worked closely with clinicians, our data analysts and the Health Information Group to define and develop clinical excellence metric sets. This has involved a lot of work including:
- specifying detailed data definitions
- identifying and linking data sources
- improving data integrity by working with clinicians and the coding department to improve documentation
- providing meaningful analysis
- reporting data visually in ways that engage clinicians
Impact
Clinical excellence metrics sets have been developed and are routinely reported in:
- General Surgery
- Upper GI Surgery
- Orthopaedics
- ORL
- Rheumatology
- Renal Medicine
- Diabetes
- Assessment, Treatment and Rehabilitation Service
- Stroke
- Respiratory Medicine
- Maternity
Roll out of the new Qlik Sense Data Discovery (business intelligence) tool commenced in January 2017 and we are incrementally incorporating clinical metrics in the tool. This involves development of data applications (apps) within the tool which link data sources and report the data by interactive dashboards that can be customised for each user. The data can be reported at the individual patient and clinician level which means that clinicians have ready access their own performance and can benchmark against their colleagues locally, nationally and internationally.
Team Members
Dr Penny Andrew – Director of i3
Dr Carlene Lawes – Public Health Physician – Surgical + Ambulatory Services
Dr Geetha Galgali – Public Health Physician – Child Women + Family