Together We Can Go Farther: Using Palliative Care Collaboratives to Drive Quality Improvement (TH304)

Abstract

•Consider the advantages of standardized quality data collection and reporting in palliative care.•Understand how two multi-site networks have enabled coordinated data collection, benchmarking, and collaborative quality improvement.•Describe how standardized data collection can support the Measuring What Matters initiative and The Joint Commission quality reporting. In the past, the simple presence of a busy palliative care service has been sufficient to justify funding. However, increasingly, individual palliative care services are being challenged to demonstrate their quality of care. This change has ignited a broad conversation about how the quality of palliative care can best be measured, and multiple committees—including AAHPM’s Measuring What Matters team and The Joint Commission—are promoting unified quality metrics for the field. Despite the growing emphasis on quality improvement (QI) and benchmarking in palliative care, many busy palliative care services are without sufficient expertise, support, or time to optimize QI efforts independently. To assist individual teams in their QI efforts and provide benchmarking of outcomes, two networks of palliative care services have been established to guide teams through the collection of prospective, standardized data on key care processes (eg, advance care planning activities) and patient-level outcomes (eg, daily symptom scores). Data are stored in centralized databases that analyze data and generate reports with comparison to others. These growing networks allow palliative care services to benchmark with others and identify best practices, which both simplifies QI and promotes greater gains in QI than any single service could make alone. In this session, we will describe two approaches to prospective data collection—the Palliative Care Quality Network (PCQN) and Quality Data Collection Tool (QDACT)—and demonstrate how these systems can support palliative care services in their QI efforts, enable QI benchmarking as promoted by the Measuring What Matters initiative, and facilitate advanced certification in palliative care through The Joint Commission. Attendees will learn QI methods and practice the initial steps in designing a QI project that they can implement in their local environment.