IROC utilizes the IHI Model for Improvement and the Chronic Care Model as a quality improvement framework to quickly, effectively, and accurately improve care.
What is Quality Improvement?
Developing health care best practices can be a slow and arduous process in the absence of a systematic approach to testing and evaluating the effectiveness of individual care approaches. IROC utilizes the IHI Model for Improvement and the Chronic Care Model (as shown below) as a quality improvement framework to quickly, effectively, and accurately improve care through identifying opportunities for improvement, testing possible solutions, and rapidly implementing identified best practices.
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Why is Quality Improvement Needed?
Identifying best practices for the treatment of children with rare diseases can be a difficult and slow process due to the relatively lower number of cases spread over a large area at isolated care centers. A learning network allows sites to share data, collaborate on quality improvement methodology, and deploy improvements to systematically determine the optimal treatment for patients.
How Does IROC Utilize Quality Improvement?
IROC harnesses the collaborative power of a learning network to connect care centers in order to pool data and use Quality Improvement methodology to make progress toward our mission of having patients with kidney disease and their caregivers achieve health, longevity, and quality of life equivalent to that of the general population.
More specifically, IROC works with its care centers to build quality improvement capability and improve outcomes by:
Focusing on improving outcomes as our singular priority,
Engaging all stakeholders (patients, families, clinicians, researchers, existing networks),
Creating and sustaining a culture of transparency, including sharing and collaboration to accelerate implementation and dissemination of ideas that work,
Using technology to effectively and efficiently capture learning from the point of care,
Integrating research seamlessly with clinical care; learning from every patient every day and implementing research findings,
Using core resources to train, mentor, and support centers in local quality improvement efforts and to facilitate the sharing and spread of ideas that work.
IROC’s Quality Improvement Success
The fruits of successfully deployed quality improvement methodology can take many forms. To date, IROC has successfully utilized its quality improvement framework to develop two change packages dedicated to controlling two main health risks associated with pediatric kidney disease (blood pressure control and kidney transplant rejection) and implement a barriers assessment tool to help caregivers, patients, and families identify barriers to medication adherence and reinforce behaviors that will optimize health, longevity, and quality of life for parents and families.
IROC’s Quality Improvement Support
IROC’s dedicated staff Quality Improvement Specialist provides support and guidance. IROC also builds care center-level quality improvement capability and a network-wide quality improvement mindset through:
Quality Improvement Fundamentals Training, which is made available to eligible IROC care centers
Semi-annual Learning Sessions
Monthly Learning Lab Calls to foster collaboration, share findings, and accelerate improvement.