On the journey to improve the quality of patient care, initiatives to enhance clinical performance are necessary. Nevertheless, they can seem to be a daunting task; in fact, these initiatives require several well-orchestrated steps to ensure the program reaches its full impact potential.

Over the past decade, The Sullivan Group has partnered with some of the largest health systems in the country to successfully implement clinical performance improvement programs proven to change clinical practice. While every organization is unique, we have developed a system of best practices for initiative implementation. 

While we’ll focus on the implementation of our Emergency Medicine Program here, similar steps could be applied to any initiative implementation. We’ll focus today on the first step for success: identifying the resources and personnel needed.

Identify Resources

Many organizational initiatives may fail to launch or stall midway because an accurate depiction of resources wasn’t communicated at the outset or the staff assigned to maintain the program are stretched too thin. As such, it’s important to define reasonable resource expectations from the launch of any program.

Because the RSQ® Solutions – Emergency Medicine Program leverages technology, minimal resources are needed for both the deployment and maintenance of the program, making it one of the most scalable clinical performance programs available.

Below is an outline of the model we recommend to implement the program and maintain its impact. You can adapt it for your organization.

Recommended Personnel Allocation

• 1-2 Organizational Administrator(s) for entire system
  • Typical Personnel: VP of Risk Management, CMO, CNO, VP of Clinical Services, Corporate Director of Risk Management
  • Time: 1 hour/week
  • Responsibility: Monitor overall progress of program to ensure goals and timelines are met.
• 1-2 Facility Administrator(s) at each hospital (Education and Assessment)
  • Typical Personnel: Medical Director, Director of Emergency Department, Asst. Medical Director, ED Nursing Director/Manager
  • Time: 1-2 hours/week
  • Responsibilities: Review learner impact reports; deliver clinical assessment results to department; identify additional clinical improvement opportunities.
• 1-2 Reviewer(s) at each hospital (Assessment)
  • Typical Personnel: ED Nurse, ED Educator, Quality/Risk Nurse, Critical Care Nurse, ED coder
  • Time: 3-4 hours/week during the Data Abstraction quarters
  • Responsibility: Input the data from the medical records into the Assessment tool (data abstraction).

Once resources are allocated toward the program, it’s important to obtain clinician support for implementation. We’ll discuss best practices for engaging clinicians in the next blog of this series.