Table 2.
Criteria Used by KPSC Leadership to Assess Potential Topics for Outpatient Safety Net Program | |
---|---|
Clinical Impact | Will it improve patient safety or quality?
|
Identification | Is the potential safety gap readily identifiable using existing electronic health data? That is:
If the potential safety problem is not readily identifiable, is it important enough that revisions to existing documentation should be considered? |
Follow-up | How many patients might be identified & what follow-up would be necessary?
|
Other Operational Considerations | Is anyone already working on addressing this safety issue? Does the issue fall solely within one group’s domain? (and thus may be better-suited to intervention by that group rather than by the centralized approach of the Safety Nets) |
The KPSC Outpatient Safety Net focuses on medication safety and diagnosis detection and follow-up. However, these are not listed among the criteria above because the Safety Net framework can be used to address a wide range of potential care gaps.
After quality gaps are identified, an intervention is required to resolve the quality gap in a timely fashion. These interventions have included: automated outreach to patients via mailed letter or Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR); notification of physicians with recommendations; use of case managers; use of pharmacists to review medications manually for flagged patients; batch order of lab tests with automated notification of the patient; and manual tracking and follow-up of other safety issues. “High volume” results require more automated solutions, or more staff, than “low volume” results; while there is no set definition for what constitutes high- versus low-volume issues, institutions will want to consider both the identification and resolution in assessing feasibility and solutions.