What is the Problem to be Solved (Current State)

Organizations are challenged to consistently, accurately assess and improve their capacity for instituting repeatable approaches to improving care delivery and outcomes; however, improving care delivery and outcomes is complex, challenging, and time consuming.

Contributing to the complexity are difficulties implementing clinical guidance, pathways and decision support interventions through care process analysis and reengineering.

Healthcare delivery organizations have differing approaches, capacities, and gaps associated with change management needed to deliver care based on state-of-the-practice evidence-based care guidance.  

• There are challenges not only across the healthcare sector, but also for individual care delivery organizations or sites diagnosing and improving their ability and capacity to support evidence-based care practices. These organizations often need support for the change management processes needed to successfully optimize care delivery and often don't know where to get that help.
• We need to encourage use of system-wide standards, evidence-based protocols for critical care processes and continuing education for clinicians related to key critical care functions. (see Recommendations from NAM re: COVID-19 lessons and needs regarding advancing innovations in practice)

What Does the Solution Look Like (Future State)

The future state includes executive support for a focus on care transformation, identification of gaps adversely affecting care delivery, care quality, and quality improvement, and action taken to improve performance and outcome through a systematic, coordinated outcomes-focused approach.

A key initial step in successful care transformation efforts is conducting an objective assessment of an organization's capacity to absorb evidence-based care practices, ranging from executive sponsorship, staffing challenges, content ownership, IT tooling, education, and a host of other issues.  The use of an industry-accepted reference maturity model allows organizations to assess their capability for process change and quality improvement and proven methodologies for organizational change management allows them to design and implement effective changes.

(See here for work in progress toward providing this toolset)

Users can access best practice tools and processes for analyzing organizational status and readiness regarding care process changes (including optimally leveraging health IT tools as appropriate) and implementing, evaluating and continually improving these changes.

Focus is "People, process, technology - in that order.”

Patients are key stakeholders and engaged in the implementation/QI process.
Well-organized toolkits comprised of specific change management/QI tools are readily available and make it easy for the user to identify, access and apply the specific tools best suited to specific tasks (clinical targets, components of QI efforts needing support, etc.) and organizational characteristics (solo practice vs. large IDN).