A robust quality management program considers a patient’s care across the patient journey, encompassing multiple facets. By viewing elements of a patient’s care and measuring standards of care across this continuum, effective quality management enables organizations to improve patient outcomes.
When deployed correctly, a quality management program can improve outcomes related to:
- Patient volumes
- Provider efficiency
- Patient access
- Provider processes
- Patient experiences
- Financial success
A quality management program can also enable organizations to assess transitions of care throughout the health system and into the community – for example, ensuring patients receive behavioral health follow-up after a related ER visit.
While making data actionable is a key goal for most health systems, it can be an intensive undertaking. Fortunately, leveraging tools like telehealth and partnering with organizations that specialize in quality management can be a big help.
In this blog, I’ll share my insights as Executive Director of Quality at Iris Telehealth and offer advice on how leveraging a strategic partnership can support a health system’s commitment to quality.
Looking at data through the lens of behavioral health helps identify correlations between conditions
Integrating behavioral health can often come with concerns around sustainability, but data shows that it can improve the patient’s overall health outcomes.
For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) highlights that behavioral conditions like depression and anxiety can worsen medical outcomes. They go on to say that integrating behavioral health care can help treat conditions like diabetes and improve medical adherence and delay the disease’s onset.
From a data standpoint, an organization can track a patient’s A1C data and see if it’s improving – they can even observe how it’s connected to something like their cardiovascular health or any number of other health conditions.
Pulling all that information together gives an organization the ability to identify where there might be correlations between conditions. Delving into this level of detail requires resources, and unfortunately, many health systems don’t have enough.
However, partnering with a quality-focused organization with behavioral health expertise can help your health system make the most of your data and set up effective reporting workflows to give a bigger picture of your behavioral health service line.
Figuring out the right reports for your goals will help your team effectively visualize your data
Approaching your data through a quality management lens can help health systems understand how changes improve metrics or identify if a new solution is needed.
At Iris, we help illustrate this data through customized reports. Here’s the approach we take when working with health systems:
- Determine priorities: We review the health system’s determined priorities, see how they intersect with our focus, and assess what we can work on together.
- Data compilation: Once we know what priorities and goals the health system wants to achieve, we provide them with visualizations of the data.
- Assessment and collaboration: After providing the health system with data visualization, we analyze it together to identify opportunities for improvement and then work together to address those opportunities and make meaningful changes.
- Tracking begins: We track how the data evolves to determine what actions have been effective or not and continue working to improve until the objective is met.
- Sustaining change: We continue to monitor data even after we’ve met a target so we can make sure that success is sustained over time.
One example of how we might leverage data to support a health system is through volume assessment. Let’s say an organization is evaluating whether to decrease therapy appointment times from 60 minutes to 45. Using a tandem measurement, such as performing depression screening consistently, can help assess whether and how the decrease in time affects the care processes as well as whether there is any effect on patient outcomes. Additionally, measuring patient satisfaction before and after the change in appointment timing can help organizations determine how it affects a patient’s perception of their care and the organization.
Looking at these three factors together would enable us to see a full picture of the effect one change has on the entire patient care experience. Importantly, it also provides data that can help inform the organization’s analysis of return on investment.
There are many factors that contribute to an affected metric – whether that be communication or even a complicated technology platform. Whatever the challenge may be, dedicated support can help assess the issue and come to a solution.
Tracking quality data helps put patients first and helps determine if your solutions are financially sustainable
Quality management is here to help people. However, an important thing to note is that we can’t really know if we’re taking care of them well unless we track the data. There must be some kind of measure — just like runners who look at their times or distance. How do they know that they can do a marathon if they’re not actually keeping track of their miles?
On the financial side, when you look at a metric like no-shows, addressing challenges in this area can help improve sustainability.
As another example, tracking depression screening scores using a validated tool, such as the PHQ-9, can provide objective data regarding a patient’s progress and can help inform their treatment plan. For example, if their depression screening results indicate improvement, it provides an opportunity to assess (with the patient) whether they can transition to less frequent visits or possibly even move on from therapy. This tracking not only demonstrates to the provider and patient the progress a patient has made, it can also improve access for new patients by opening up slots in the provider’s schedule.
Where Iris Telehealth fits in
The benefit of having a quality management solution in place at your health system is the ability to look at a patient’s health outcomes across all specialties and see where there may be intersections between how specialties are working together and where opportunities to collaborate may lie.
If you’d like to learn more about how quality management could benefit your health system, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. You can reach out to someone here!
