Healthcare Informatics magazine recognized UT Southwestern Medical Center with the 2016 Innovator Award, recognizing the center’s dedication to boosting infrastructure between its two hospitals and more than two dozen outpatient locations.
UT Southwestern’s Ambulatory Quality Outcomes Project joins together clinicians, clinical informatics, IT, analytics, and administration representatives to share data and improve the quality of care. University president Dr. Daniel K. Podolsky launched the program in January 2015, bringing those four categories together in what he called the “quadrad.” From there, UTSW engaged its physicians at 40 outpatient care locations and standardized the processes.
“At the practical level, this meant literally requiring all physicians within a specialty to document things in the same way and in the same place within their documentation within the EHR, in order to facilitate analytics and data-sharing. Crucially, Quadrad leaders agreed that the only way to spread innovation quickly across the health system was to avoid a repeated “one-off” approach, and instead, to compel physician leaders in all the ambulatory specialties to work collaboratively on a standardized data and documentation approach to the initiative.”
Rather be a “one-off” initiative, the magazine praised UT Southwestern for forging a cultural shift by engaging all its specialists across the spectrum in their day-to-day activities. Once standardized, the data can be translated into something that shows what’s working and what isn’t.
“Not surprisingly, that approach separates the UT Southwestern organization from the small-bore, one-at-a-time clinical performance improvement approaches of so many patient care organizations nationwide.”
