Obtain statistics, IT skills to advance in quality
Quality professionals must be data analysts
Are you able to clearly explain the meaning of performance measurement data to support organizational evaluation, decision making, and operational improvement? "It is no longer sufficient to produce colorful graphs and numerical reports and hope that other people will understand the relevance of the information," says Patrice Spath, RHIT, a Forest Grove, OR-based consultant in health care quality and resource management.
Quality professionals must be data analysts as well as information gatherers, says Spath. "Senior leaders are looking to quality professionals to provide the data needed to advance performance excellence in the organization," she says. "Quality professionals must be adequately prepared to fulfill this role." In fact, some quality director positions are now being filled by quality professionals from a variety of other industries, Spath says.
"Although they don’t have health care experience, they do have information management and statistical analysis skills — two attributes that are highly prized by health care leaders," she says. "If you want to be in a director position in the future, gaining these skills will be important."
On a daily basis, quality professionals evaluate the adequacy of quality controls for JCAHO standards and compliance with documentation issues and recommendations for improvement, says Paula Swain, MSN, CPHQ, FNAHQ, director of clinical and regulatory review at Presbyterian Healthcare in Charlotte, NC. "Also, many of the Evidence of Standards Compliance require measures of success that must be arrived at through data collection," she adds.
Sandra L. Abnett, BS, CPHQ, RHIT, director of quality management at York, PA-based Wellspan Health, obtained statistical analysis skills by attending various seminars on advanced statistical analysis. "I also have kept my RHIT and CPHQ status through the years, which provides me journals with articles on clinical and administrative analysis," she adds.
Abnett teaches courses offered at the health system on statistical process control, performance improvement tools, action planning, root cause analysis, and failure-mode health care analysis. "Teaching these classes at least twice a year helps me maintain knowledge on these skills," she says. "Class participants provide constructive comments about skills they use in statistical analysis."
To maintain these skills, Abnett has built relationships with a network of in-house and external individuals to keep current on changes in coding, e-health, clinical care changes, and information systems management.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s "100,000 Lives" campaign has allowed many quality professionals to network with others who share data collection and analysis issues, notes Swain.
The creation of rapid response teams has caused groups of people to calculate the efficiency of teams that find and save patients from codes on general units and has sparked improvements shared by multiple facilities, Swain explains. "Plotting the course of improvement and sharing findings with others helps quality professionals look at their data differently, ask other questions, and collect better data," she says.
Some quality directors are returning to school to obtain a health information management (HIM) degree, which covers informatics and computerization skills, statistical analysis, and research competencies. Several universities offer on-line HIM degree programs, notes Spath, who teaches the on-line quality management course for the HIM degree program at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
The health care industry is moving toward measurement of outcomes, which demands reviewing, presenting, and interpreting data, adds Elizabeth Begley, MA, CPHQ, a partner in the Brookeville, MD-based consulting firm Healthcare Quality Resources.
She points to pay for performance based on clinical outcomes, national patient safety initiatives, public reporting of clinical indicators by regulatory agencies, and practitioner-specific outcomes data. "With the application of these skills, the quality professional can successfully lead this movement within their organization."
Begley recommends the following:
— obtaining a strong fundamental academic background in math, statistics, and information systems. "Some exposure to basic programming and database management is also very valuable," Begley says.
— obtaining professional certification in health care quality offered from the National Association for Healthcare Quality or American Society for Quality.
— allowing colleagues to challenge your data prior to presentation. "This time spent is extremely valuable in building your professional credibility as a content expert," says Begley.
— studying solutions from other industries and professional disciplines.
"Both my undergraduate and graduate curriculum included vigorous math, statistic, and IT requirements," says Begley. "The advantage of these requirements were not apparent during my educational process, but application of the information became valuable in a multitude of situations."
These include creating measurable outcomes, understanding the benefits of reviewing data over time, and comprehending cause and effect or correlation. "These are all essential to the success of an organization," says Begley.
The trick to statistical analysis skill building is to put yourself in a "rich environment of analysis," says Swain. She recommends taking quality management courses at community colleges with a focus on data collection, interpretation, and action planning.
"It was at one of these non-health care-related sessions that my brain finally got the message Look back at how the data was collected,’ that helped answer the question about what to do next," says Swain.
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