Pediatric Hospital Medicine: A Strategic Planning Roundtable
Pediatric Hospital Medicine: A Strategic Planning Roundtable
National and governmental agencies have influenced quality and performance improvement measurements in adult healthcare, resulting in improvements in adult healthcare quality measurement. There is limited similar influence or measure development in pediatric medicine, so the "quality chasm" between adult and child healthcare has widened. Few resources are invested in improving quality and safety of pediatric inpatient care. Of the 18 private health insurance plans' quality and pay for performance programs identified by Leapfrog, only 17% developed pediatric-specific inpatient measures. Only 5 of 40 controlled trials of quality improvement efforts for children published between 1980 and 1998 addressed inpatient problems.
There have been recent efforts at the national level addressing these issues, highlighted by the introduction of The Children's Health Care Quality Act, in 2007. Early studies in PHM systems focused on overall operational efficiency, documenting 9% to 16% decreases in length of stay and cost compared to traditional models of care. Conway et al. identified higher reported adherence to evidence-based care for hospitalists compared to community pediatricians. However, Landrigan et al. demonstrated that there is still large variation in care that exists in the management of common inpatient diagnoses, lacking strong evidence-based guidelines even among pediatric hospitalists. Moreover, there have been no significant studies reviewing the impact of pediatric hospitalists on safety of inpatient care. Magnifying these challenges is the reality that our healthcare system is fragmented with various entities scrambling to define, measure, and compare the effectiveness and safety of pediatric healthcare.
These challenges create an opportunity for PHM to develop a model of how to deliver the highest quality and safest care to our patients. The solution is complex and will take cooperation at many levels of our healthcare system. Improving the safety and quality of care for children in all settings of inpatient care in the United States may best be accomplished via an effective collaborative. This collaborative should be comprehensive and inclusive, and focused on demonstrating and disseminating how standardized, evidence-based care in both clinical and safety domains can lead to high-value and high-quality outcomes. The success of PHM will be measured by its ability to deliver a clear value proposition to all consumers and payers of healthcare. The creation of a robust national collaborative network is a first step towards meeting this goal and will take an extraordinary effort. A PHM Quality Improvement (QI) Collaborative workgroup was created in August 2009. Three collaboratives have been commissioned: (1) Reduction of patient identification errors; (2) Improving discharge communication to referring primary care providers for pediatric hospitalist programs, and (3) Reducing the misuse and overuse of bronchodilators for bronchiolitis. All the collaborative groups have effectively engaged key groups of stakeholders and utilized standard QI tools, demonstrating improvement by the fall of 2010 (unpublished data, S.N.).
Quality
National and governmental agencies have influenced quality and performance improvement measurements in adult healthcare, resulting in improvements in adult healthcare quality measurement. There is limited similar influence or measure development in pediatric medicine, so the "quality chasm" between adult and child healthcare has widened. Few resources are invested in improving quality and safety of pediatric inpatient care. Of the 18 private health insurance plans' quality and pay for performance programs identified by Leapfrog, only 17% developed pediatric-specific inpatient measures. Only 5 of 40 controlled trials of quality improvement efforts for children published between 1980 and 1998 addressed inpatient problems.
There have been recent efforts at the national level addressing these issues, highlighted by the introduction of The Children's Health Care Quality Act, in 2007. Early studies in PHM systems focused on overall operational efficiency, documenting 9% to 16% decreases in length of stay and cost compared to traditional models of care. Conway et al. identified higher reported adherence to evidence-based care for hospitalists compared to community pediatricians. However, Landrigan et al. demonstrated that there is still large variation in care that exists in the management of common inpatient diagnoses, lacking strong evidence-based guidelines even among pediatric hospitalists. Moreover, there have been no significant studies reviewing the impact of pediatric hospitalists on safety of inpatient care. Magnifying these challenges is the reality that our healthcare system is fragmented with various entities scrambling to define, measure, and compare the effectiveness and safety of pediatric healthcare.
These challenges create an opportunity for PHM to develop a model of how to deliver the highest quality and safest care to our patients. The solution is complex and will take cooperation at many levels of our healthcare system. Improving the safety and quality of care for children in all settings of inpatient care in the United States may best be accomplished via an effective collaborative. This collaborative should be comprehensive and inclusive, and focused on demonstrating and disseminating how standardized, evidence-based care in both clinical and safety domains can lead to high-value and high-quality outcomes. The success of PHM will be measured by its ability to deliver a clear value proposition to all consumers and payers of healthcare. The creation of a robust national collaborative network is a first step towards meeting this goal and will take an extraordinary effort. A PHM Quality Improvement (QI) Collaborative workgroup was created in August 2009. Three collaboratives have been commissioned: (1) Reduction of patient identification errors; (2) Improving discharge communication to referring primary care providers for pediatric hospitalist programs, and (3) Reducing the misuse and overuse of bronchodilators for bronchiolitis. All the collaborative groups have effectively engaged key groups of stakeholders and utilized standard QI tools, demonstrating improvement by the fall of 2010 (unpublished data, S.N.).
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