Establishing a Useful and Usable "Out of the Box" Quality Improvement Library for Enhanced Health System Efficiency and Outcomes

Project Abstract Phrase Health is a clinical decision support (CDS) analytics company that empowers health systems to efficiently incorporate scientific knowledge into high value clinical care through iterative, data-driven improvements. CDS is a process for enhancing health‐related decisions and actions with pertinent, organized clinical knowledge and patient information. While CDS has improved outcomes in sickle cell disease, myocardial infarction, and many other diseases, its impact has been inconsistent. Continuous evaluation of CDS is critical to achieve consistent improvement in outcomes, but evaluating CDS is burdensome for health systems and often not performed. To address these challenges, Phrase Health developed a product called Outcomes that offers a self-service guided walkthrough for quality improvement (QI) advocates of variable experience levels to (1) rigorously evaluate the impact of CDS on clinical outcomes and (2) convert data-driven insights into action. The approach has early market traction with advanced technical users. However, user feedback cites a need for “out of the box” QI templates (defined as abstracted definitions for CDS interventions, cohorts, measures, and their associations) to provide more structure and guidance. To address this market demand with a high-value product, we will generate a library of “out of the box” QI templates that target the inpatient management of diseases in the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) populated by both customer-generated content and ones authored by the study team. In Aim 1, we will translate two clinical use cases already established by partner systems within our platform: (1) inpatient management of pneumonia and (2) inpatient management of congestive heart failure (CHF). In Aim 2, we will use our authoring platform to develop two de novo projects: (1) inpatient management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and (2) inpatient management of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). We will calculate the time and costs associated with developing a new QI project template using our authoring platform. At the end of this project, we will have established the start of a library that translates clinical guidelines into care delivery via “out of the box” QI templates for a set of diseases tied to significant financial incentives, but also assessed the necessary investments required to scale to more disease templates. These data will begin to address the market’s demand for accessible QI tools linked to electronic workflows and quantify future investment needs, allowing us to commercialize and accelerate the translation of knowledge into better health outcomes and support improved health system profitability in a value-based reimbursement environment.