Improving care delivery is a business and mission imperative for health centers, and the HITEQ Center offers a growing collection of tools and services to support this journey. The foundation for these particular offerings is the "Guide for Improving Care Processes and Outcomes in FQHCs." This web-based resource provides step-by-step guidance on understanding and improving workflows and information flows that drive performance on key targets such as hypertension control and colorectal cancer screening. Guide centerpieces include worksheets for documenting, analyzing, sharing and improving care processes for such targets.
Strategies and tools in the Guide have been used successfully in various quality improvement (QI) initiatives, and a HITEQ Center focus is spreading this value more quickly and widely among health centers. This introductory training session introduces health centers and their partners to the Guide's proven approaches, worksheets and other health IT-enabled QI tools. Health Centers and their partners can incorporate these approaches into their existing QI activities, or use them as a foundation for putting a solid QI foundation in place. The session empowers attendees with critical 'what to know' and 'what to do' QI information, and concludes by recommending a 'quick-win' exercise wherein attendees use a worksheet in a brief exercise with their teams to document current care processes for a high priority target, and brainstorm potential improvements. Material in the Guide and in the training session provide further details about performing a more robust care process analysis, as well as on prioritizing, implementing, evaluating and sustaining improvements surfaced during the analysis phase.