Jesse McLaren outlines 10 Quality Improvement (QI) opportunities for reducing missed AMIs and the lessons learned from Ontario’s Emergency Department Return Visit Quality Program in this Waiting to Be Seen blog...
What does the evidence say about the true utility of physician performance feedback and scorecards? Do they meet a real need for information to guide self-improvement or just scratch our competitive itches? What do we know about the best way to provide feedback? In this month’s guest blog Dr. Amy Cheng, the Emergency Department Director of Quality Improvement at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto with an interest in physician performance feedback, reviews what’s known and comments on her own experiences...
Last month in introducing part one of our guest blog on quality assurance I told a story about a missed opportunity with follow-up care. This month I’d like to share a story with a happier ending. Recently, a patient presented at our emergency department (ED) with a non-specific fever. After discharge the patient’s blood cultures were reported positive, but attempts to reach this person over the ensuing 36 hours at the contact numbers provided were unsuccessful. An enterprising colleague googled the patient and found contact information online that eventually led to a call to the patient in a hotel room in another city, but when reached the patient was ill and confused...
A New York Times article titled “How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers” went viral on social media in January and caused a lot of chatter in medical circles. Its author, a professor of medicine at the University of California, gave voice to a wide sense of frustration, and while I understand that feeling and think it’s justified, I don’t agree with labelling measurement as the culprit. As I expressed in my first WTBS blog post, “Why Recording Time to Initial Assessment is Worthwhile,” I believe my job as an administrator is to make the job of my staff easier, and measurements can help us maintain standards of care and understand where gaps in the system may exist—when such data are collected and used appropriately. In this guest blog, Dr. Lucas Chartier, an emergency physician in Toronto with a background in quality improvement, expands on the subject of how we’ve gone off course in our zeal for measurement and helps us try to find the path back to our intended goals.