Quality Benchmark Project: Description & Due Dates
Broad Overview
Week 1: Research & Decide. Choose and begin researching a significant quality issue. It can be anything that you believe is vital to patient safety and/or improving overall quality of care. Some examples may include:
- Hand hygiene, to include nosocomial infections driving healthcare costs
- Medication errors, to include transcription errors or staffing issues. How does fixed hospital budgets fit in?
- Patient falls, to include alarm fatigue or short hospital stays – Who pays the cost if a patient falls while in the hospital?
- Bed sores acquired in the hospital. Who pays if the patient gets a bed sore while at the hospital?
- Misdiagnosis and how that affects short and long-term patient care. How does that affect healthcare costs?
- Issues with patient identification – may tie into treatment errors and billing issues.
- Documentation quality and how it negatively affects reimbursement and drives hospital costs.
- Budget costs limiting up-to-date technology or research-based interventions from being implemented.
- Inter-departmental communication, to include nursing triage and efficient, safe decision-making. Consider if this is an effective use of time management and how it can be improved.
- Staffing ratios – is it really a nursing shortage or just budgetary restrictions? How does this negatively affect quality of care, nursing retention and hospital costs long-term? How does it affect patient and staff satisfaction?
- Integrating mental health into medical. When a patient comes in for a heart transplant, for example, we need to consider depression and anxiety – quality of life issues after discharge, psychosocial issues etc. Dissolve the current system of medical focusing on medical and psych focusing on psych and merge the two for a comprehensive patient overview.
- Managing health care costs and chronic disease. Consider cost of prevention to keep acute from becoming chronic and long-term benefit to our society.
Week 2: Quality Benchmark Project, Part 1. “The Proposal” is a minimum of 2-pages, not including title page and reference page. Written in APA format – must follow sample paper provided or you will get it returned to try again. Late penalties may apply. Title page – Use required Sample Paper Template, 7th ed. for this course. It is located under the module part of the classroom.
