Continuous quality improvement is a concept growing in popularity amongst hospitals and health systems with goals of systemically monitoring and improving clinical and operational outcomes. This effort, however, is also of great importance for private practices.
As patients continue to act as consumers within the service industry, researching clinician and organizational reviews prior to choosing a provider, private practices are incentivized to prioritize quality of care.
DMOS Orthopaedic Centers, for example, has an organization-wide effort to standardize quality of care and utilizes patient-reported outcomes data to identify areas of excellence and opportunity.
Patients have choice when it comes to receiving clinical care and our outcomes are a natural part of their assessment,” said Rich Green, Chief Operation Officer, DMOS. DMOS partnered with PatientIQ to obtain and measure patient-reported outcomes data.
DMOS utilized the platform to establish a baseline of quality of care across its providers and locations, and then collected and analyzed patient-reported data on an ongoing basis. This continuous collection of data required no additional work on behalf of clinicians – the quality initiative continued without interruption to daily workflows or increasing administrative burden.
DMOS utilized the PatientIQ platform to benchmark outcomes against national averages and compare its performance to other organizations. Italso measured patient satisfaction and collected patient reviews.
Collecting data is the first step; measurement the second. However, DMOS knew acting up on the data was the true objective.
With its quality-of-care improvement initiative, utilizing the PatientIQ platform, DMOS was able to outperform national averages for one-year post-operative outcomes for total hip and total joint replacement surgeries.
DMOS also identified quality improvements in spine, sports shoulder, hip, and elbow outcomes as well as in increase inpatient satisfaction.