Healthcare Quality Week: Leveraging Tech for Better Outcomes

Healthcare Quality Week is here, and with it comes the opportunity to appreciate the hard work of quality professionals across the industry. This week is also a time to recognize the innovations that help enable better care outcomes and the driving force behind all of healthcare: delivering excellent care to every patient.

This blog summarizes the importance of National Quality Week, and the value of data-driven technology in empowering quality professionals with greater visibility, accuracy, and insights to deliver high-quality patient outcomes every day.

Why celebrate National Healthcare Quality Week?

Healthcare Quality Week is led by the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) and is defined as a “dedicated time to celebrate the profession and raise awareness of the positive impact healthcare quality professionals have in their organizations and communities.”

Quality professionals often operate in the background of healthcare; they aren’t the providers patients see in their care visits or the developers of new drugs or treatments. However, their contributions are highly impactful, helping many facets of the healthcare system operate smoother to better meet patient needs.

Some responsibilities of a quality professional include:

• • Improving patient safety
  • Enhancing the delivery of care
  • Optimizing the cost of care and the resources allocated to care
  • Having a working knowledge of population health

When these responsibilities are met across teams and specialties, all of healthcare benefits. That’s why National Quality Week is so important!

Using technology to support quality professionals across the industry every day

While this week is an exciting, thoughtful time to appreciate the quality professionals in your organization – what happens next? How can you best support these team members in their day-to-day? We’ve compiled a few suggestions below.

Health plans:

Make it easier for your quality team members to accomplish their goals. Empower them with data-driven technology for documentation and reporting. Ensure they have the right resources to engage providers and analyze member outcomes, especially for value-based care initiatives.

Offer annual training before HEDIS® reporting season and consider strategic staffing methods during reporting season to offset burnout. Perhaps find solutions that help verify reporting data is accurate and complete to further support HEDIS reporting needs.

Providers:

Just as quality measurement and reporting is essential for health plans, it’s important for provider organizations to understand the wellness of their patient populations. However, when nurses and caregivers are overwhelmed with immediate care needs, there isn’t much time in the day to analyze data and look at the big picture of their population’s wellness.

That’s where quality professionals come in. They use performance data and review existing processes to find gaps in care and inform action to close those gaps.

Are there quality metrics the organization could be performing better on? Do your Star Ratings have room for improvement? These may be areas that quality professionals need more resources – technology, patient data, benchmarking data, or simply training – to help drive desired outcomes.

At the patient level, quality professionals make it easier for providers to deliver the care each person needs. Their thorough documentation and deep understanding of patient safety enables them to ensure providers meet the mark every time. They also identify organization successes, which can be just as important as addressing areas of improvement.

In turn, providers can offer ongoing training and development to their quality professionals. They can also share patient success stories with their quality team to express the value of their efforts beyond documents and data analytics.

Pharmacies:

As quality professionals continue to support medication adherence and patient satisfaction, leaders in the pharmacy setting can explore opportunities to better support and recognize these individuals.

Support can look like implementing new pharmacy management technology, better workflows, bringing in more team members, and sending associates to seminars or continued education to expand their skillset.

Improving quality outcomes with Inovalon

This week is all about celebrating individual and industry achievements as we all continue the pursuit of improving care outcomes and costs.

At Inovalon, we’re dedicated to empowering customers to use data to improve healthcare outcomes and efficiencies. Discover how Inovalon can help your organization improve quality and more.

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