ED Quality Improvement Programs

Defining and measuring the quality of care delivered by the emergency department and other hospital departments is essential both for demonstrating to stakeholders (hospital leadership, patients, healthcare system, etc,) the value of the provided service and for identifying areas in which emergency care delivery can be improved.

The Quality Assurance Program at Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians (Department of Emergency Medicine) is a comprehensive program built to ensure high quality of patient care through the proper identification of systems issues and clinical care issues. The Quality Assurance Program is based on an electronic flagging system that allows ED and hospital clinical leadership to effectively respond to care of patients in whom an error or adverse event might have occurred, patient complaints, and physician complaints, while also systematically reviewing patient morbidity or mortality, 72-hour patient readmissions, ICU transfers < 24 hours, and other critical clinical cases such as STEMIs, traumas, and code strokes. Extensive case review takes place during a twice monthly quality committee meeting and a monthly multidisciplinary hospital quality committee meeting, with additional STEMI, stroke, and trauma specialized committee meetings. Ongoing quality review occurs daily by a team of physician and nurse leaders operating a proprietary electronic quality monitoring system.

Our quality project team will help your department with:

• Design a framework for describing ED and trauma healthcare quality: structure, process, outcome

• Set standards based on evidence-based guidelines

• Develop clinical protocols with which to measure quality

• Implement a quality program with measurement strategies and an appropriate array of indicators.