Together We Can Go Farther: Using Palliative Care Registries and Collaboratives to Drive Quality Improvement (FR454)

Abstract

•Discuss the current landscape of quality measurement and why it's important for program development, quality improvement (QI), monitoring the field, and reporting for quality and payment.•Describe an overarching palliative care quality strategy that can be used to improve the quality of care at attendees’ local institutions.•Describe how our separate quality strategies meet these needs and how they will collaborate into one overarching quality initiative for our field coordinated by AAHPM.•Describe the advantages of participating in data collection collaboratives such as the Palliative Care Quality Network (PCQN), Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance (GPCQA), and the National Palliative Care Registry™.•Describe how to use comparative data to evaluate your own palliative care program, improve your quality of care, and enable the Measuring What Matters initiative, The Joint Commission quality reporting, and other national quality reporting programs. As palliative care programs face increasing pressure to demonstrate their quality in order to advocate for support and expansion and to be paid by insurers, standardization in collection and reporting of quality data is increasingly important to allow for benchmarking and reporting. Three initiatives address these needs: the Palliative Care Quality Network (PCQN), the Global Palliative Care Quality Alliance (GPCQA), and the National Palliative Care Registry™. This session provides an overview of these initiatives, describes their collaboration, and discusses how they are together advancing quality improvement and positioning our field for reporting and payment. The PCQN and GPCQA are quality improvement (QI) collaboratives that support teams to collect prospective, standardized data on key care processes (e.g. advance care planning activities) and patient-level outcomes (e.g. daily symptom scores). Members of the collaboratives use standardized data to drive multisite QI initiatives. These growing networks allow benchmarking and identification of best practices to promote greater gains in QI than any service could make alone. The National Palliative Care Registry™ is a national annual survey focusing on composition and operations of palliative care programs. The goal of the Registry is to: assist palliative care programs in tracking their development year-to-year; and promote standardization and improve the quality of palliative care. The Registry provides actionable information that programs can use to secure, expand and retain resources for delivery of high-quality palliative care. Data from the registry can also support the establishment of new palliative care programs where none exists. In this session, attendees will learn about these initiatives and how together they support the improvement and expansion of palliative care programs in complementary ways. Data from each contribute to our understanding of practice and quality and addresses essential issues regarding reporting and payment. Attendees will learn how these efforts fit into an overarching palliative care quality strategy.