QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
The Power of Quality Improvement
Transforming health care and outcomes for individuals with rare diseases is difficult within the current health care system. Discovery and improvement are often limited by small numbers of patients at any one care center.
Individual care centers often do not have enough patients with Fontan circulation to achieve appropriate sample sizes for research or quality improvement (QI) activities, making partnerships between collaboration among multiple centers necessary.
To achieve our mission and vision, FON uses quality improvement science, the IHI’s Collaborative Model for Achieving Breakthrough Improvement, and the IHI's Model for Improvement (linked below) to improve care and redesign the system.
FON will work with care centers to build QI capability and improve outcomes by:
Establishing a Best-Practices Infrastructure:
The network establishes an infrastructure of care best-practices, which care centers can rapidly implement without having to devote the time and money to develop their own QI systems and network to establish these best-practices on their own.
Providing QI Education and Coaching:
Our QI leaders provide education and coaching about the QI processes, including a systems framework and improvement methods for testing and implementing improvements–within single care centers and across all FON care centers.Fostering Collaboration Across Care Centers:
The network utilizes the “All teach, all learn” philosophy, hosts biannual learning sessions for the entire network community, and supports quality improvement projects dedicated to specific health outcomes.
Managing Data:
The network hosts a secure, HIPAA-compliant data management infrastructure, including web-based data entry, data storage, reports, and data analyses.
Producing Shared Network Resources:
Through our QI work, collaboration, and research, we’re able to develop resources to be shared throughout the network. We’ll add these to our website as they are developed.
