News and Events

The Art of the Chart Wednesday, February 27, 2014 - A recent article at the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality talks about run charts and how helpful they are to visualize QI results. Is the change you've spurred a positive change? How will you know if the improvements are being sustained over time? Run charts make it easy to answer these questions. For pointers on using run charts, check out The Art of the Chart: 10 Tips and Rules for Using Run Charts.
Webinar on Process Standardization in Illinois Join us at 12 p.m. ET on Tuesday, February 25, 2014 to hear from staff of the Kane County Health Department about their initiative to standardize a process for filling out routine food inspection forms. Register for the webinar here.
QI Innovator Award Nominations Announced! Thursday, February 20, 2014 -We are proud to announce the first round of QI Innovator nominations. This is an opportunity for public health practitioners to nominate innovative QI practitioners and recognize their hard work in championing a QI effort and culture. Applications will be accepted until March 14, 2014 and can be found under the Community tab on the PHQIX website. The PHQIX team and two members of the Expert Panel will jointly select the nominees. One winner will be announced in mid-March and will receive an iPad mini and a PHQIX sweatshirt. The winner will also be featured on the PHQIX website.
QI Culture Map Tool Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - This QI Culture Map tool, created by Dan Ward of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, visually captures the status of the QI Culture adoption within an organization. View it here on the Public Health Foundation (PHF) website.
Community Health Assessment and Improvement Planning in Kansas Monday, February 17, 2014 - The Kansas Health Institute recently released an issue brief and report that summarizes the results of a study on CHA/CHIP experiences and outcomes in Kansas between 2012 and 2013. The study was funded by the NNPHI-managed Public Health Services & Systems Research (PHSSR) Program. Learn more.
Implementing Successful QI Webinar Series: January Overview Monday, February 10, 2014 - On January 30th, PHQIX held the second webinar of its three-part "Implementing Successful QI" webinar series, featuring Connecticut Department of Public Health. Over 120 webinar attendees logged in from across the United States to hear about CT DPH's QI initiative to better collect and report on sociodemographic characteristics in their databases, to align with federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB)-15 standards. Missed it? We've got you covered! You can find the recorded webinar in the PHQIX Media section of our site, and the PowerPoint presentation here. We also asked Susan Logan, our speaker from CT DPH, to answer some of your outstanding questions from the webinar. See her answers below! Is a process map not the current process but what you need it to be? How did you decide this was the best route to go? I have had situations where it seems like that might be a useful route and interested in your perspective. If there is a process already in place that you are trying to modify or streamline, then I would think you would want to map out the current process and develop a future state process map of what you want the new process to look like. In our case, there was no existing process, so we thought a map of the improvement process would work best for us. We thought about all of the steps we needed to take to make the improvements and where there would be roadblocks where we couldn't make changes; such as was it financially feasible, did DPH have control to make the changes, etc. As you were incorporating sociodemographic components for 40+ databases, were you also working to share data between those databases? We are interested in aggregating data for assessment purposes. Our first priority in this project was to modify the databases so they would be in compliance with the sociodemographic data collection policy. Since we started the CQI committee meetings, we've thought about some of the data issues that we all deal with, including data sharing, merging of databases, common identifiers, etc. We are discussing right now the scope of the committee, and for now merging and aggregation of databases is out of the scope. The first priority for us is modifying the databases we know are noncompliant and later we may be able to tackle some of those other data issues. You mentioned a QI reward to pursue QI work. Where did this reward come from? What were the requirements? We had an opportunity in early 2012 to apply for a QI Award being offered by the Robert Wood Johnson Founadtion and National Network of Public Health Institutes. It was a monetary award plus time spent working with a QI coach. CT DPH was in the first of at least 2 rounds of the QI Awards. I believe you can find out more information on that on the NNPHI website. Who championed the effort to help remove barriers with the people who did make the changes? Our project sponsor, Margaret Hynes, a senior-level epidemiologist at CT DPH, championed the effort to remove barriers with people and programs. She is thoughtful and well-respected by many in our agency and has been working towards improving health equity for many years now. The changes we made were not costly and ultimately did not take a lot of time and staff resources. I think the best thing was to sit face-to face with the right people and discuss the importance of the effort and how it could be accomplished. Is there a way to help people with critical databases become compliant even if there is limited funds and staff? (I think this would be a great question to talk about “while we know that revisions to data systems may be costly and hard to accomplish for a variety of reasons, can you give us a few tips in getting the process started?) The easiest thing to do is to sit down with the data owners and find out what can be done and how much it would cost. We have a recommendation to senior leadership that requests that they support the allocation of grant funds from different programs across the agency to be put into a general fund for upgrading and modifying databases as needed. So for a small program with limited resources, they would still have the capacity to upgrade the databases as needed by pulling from this general pool. Did you have to go back into the databases that you made changes to and fill in all the new changes/missing information? No, we did not require or request that the database owners go back and make changes to the data already in the databases. We only asked that they make the changes to the paper reporting forms and the electronic databases so that they would be able to capture the new sociodemographic information prospectively.
If You Don't Improve, You _______ Thursday, February 6, 2014 - Read this informative article from the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ) about trends in the quality improvement field.