Quality Improvement

"What Quality Means to Us: To us, quality means delivering care that is effective, safe, coordinated, timely and convenient. To find out if we are achieving quality care, we constantly measure our healthcare performance by collecting hundreds of quality measures. We make our Quality Report Card public to let you know how we measure up to national healthcare quality comparisons." Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Resident Quality Improvement Events:

October 14, 2010: Excellence in Process Improvement Award

The project involved instituting a multidisciplinary rounding checklist for all patients in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. The checklist targeted areas known to be important to providing the highest level of patient care, including duration of central lines, foley catheters and empiric antibiotics, compliance with DVT and GI prophylaxis and the use of a ventilatory bundle for weaning. In addition to the checklist, a prompting resident, whose job was to ensure that the medical team addressed all checklist parameters, was present on rounds. Analysis after 3 months showed significantly improved quality outcomes for the group using a checklist with a prompter compared to a control group. The project received an Excellence in Process Improvement Award at NMH Quality Day 2010.

Team members:

Curtis H. Weiss MD MS
Farzad Moazed MD (in photo)
Colleen A. McEvoy MD
Benjamin D. Singer MD
Igal Szleifer PhD
Luís A. N. Amaral PhD
Mary Kwasny ScD
Charles M. Watts MD
Jacob I. Sznajder MD
Richard G. Wunderink MD

Night and Day: The association between night or weekend admission and hospitalization-relevant patient outcomes
(by R Khanna, K Wachsberg, A Marouni, J Feinglass, Mark Williams, D Wayne)

Comparison of Quality of Care and Guideline Adherence in Patients with Advanced CKD with and without Nephrology Evaluation
(by Julia Ratner MD, Stephen D. Persell MD, Aashish Didwania MD, Jason Thompson, David W. Baker MD)

Ongoing and Completed Quality Improvement Projects

Inpatient Quality Projects
coming soon
Outpatient Quality Projects
- NMFF Resident Clinic Quality Improvement: Trends from 2009-2010

- CKD SGIM: a note from Aashish Didwania: There are several opportunities to participate in research and QI in Primary Care. Over the last 2 years we have had resident led projects on Smoking Cessation, Bone Health, HIV screening, Chronic Kidney Disease and Quality Measuring. We have had several residents present there work at the national SGIM conference; (see presentation). The aim of projects is to improve quality of care for patients but with research methodologies in anticipation of publishing results.
VA Quality Projects
VA Lakeside Patients' Quality Metrics: Trends from 2008-2010

Watch our video interview with Lee Francis, MD MHP, on the Future of Electronic Health Records and their pertinance in improving patient outcomes.

A note from Aashish Didwania, MD:

"We are putting together an elective rotation in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety. This will be offered next year, but may be available sooner. If you have an interest, please let me know.

QI and Patient Safety are central to Generalist, Hospitalist and even the Sub-specialties. The goal of the rotation will be to develop skills in analyzing your environment and intervening in thoughtful and structured ways. Really, the purpose is to be an expert at making health care delivery better. These skills are being valued more and more by hospitals and clinics national and they compliment the patient care skills you are learning every day. There is potential to have an academic product (poster, paper) through this. The rotation will be led by some outstanding faculty mentors.

The rotation will include: