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A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure
Introduction Heart failure is the most common cause of hospital admission in patients >65 years and around 50% of patients will be readmitted within 6 months. Inability to achieve timely outpatient follow-up may contribute to the high rates of avoidable rehospitalisation for this group of patient...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BMJ Publishing Group
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5699116/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29450270 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000052 |
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author | Schofield, Toni Duero Posada, Juan Foroutan, Farid Alba, Ana Carolina McDonald, Michael Linghorne, Meredith |
author_facet | Schofield, Toni Duero Posada, Juan Foroutan, Farid Alba, Ana Carolina McDonald, Michael Linghorne, Meredith |
author_sort | Schofield, Toni |
collection | PubMed |
description | Introduction Heart failure is the most common cause of hospital admission in patients >65 years and around 50% of patients will be readmitted within 6 months. Inability to achieve timely outpatient follow-up may contribute to the high rates of avoidable rehospitalisation for this group of patients. Canadian guidelines recommend patients with heart failure should be seen within 14 days of discharge. Methods An audit demonstrated that less than half of advanced heart failure patients were being followed up within 14 days. In an effort to improve postdischarge follow-up in our heart function clinic, we used process mapping and applied a series of iterative changes to the appointment booking system using Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles to reduce waste and standardise. Results The primary outcome measure, tracked over a period of 20 months, was percentage of patients booked within 14 days. At baseline, 37% of patients were seen within 14 days. After our series of interventions related to streamlining and standardising the appointment booking process, 77% of patients were seen within 14 days and 100% of patients were seen within 21 days. Conclusion The changes made to the appointment booking process were reproducible, sustainable, effective and required no additional resources or funding. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5699116 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | BMJ Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-56991162018-02-15 A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure Schofield, Toni Duero Posada, Juan Foroutan, Farid Alba, Ana Carolina McDonald, Michael Linghorne, Meredith BMJ Open Qual BMJ Quality improvement report Introduction Heart failure is the most common cause of hospital admission in patients >65 years and around 50% of patients will be readmitted within 6 months. Inability to achieve timely outpatient follow-up may contribute to the high rates of avoidable rehospitalisation for this group of patients. Canadian guidelines recommend patients with heart failure should be seen within 14 days of discharge. Methods An audit demonstrated that less than half of advanced heart failure patients were being followed up within 14 days. In an effort to improve postdischarge follow-up in our heart function clinic, we used process mapping and applied a series of iterative changes to the appointment booking system using Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles to reduce waste and standardise. Results The primary outcome measure, tracked over a period of 20 months, was percentage of patients booked within 14 days. At baseline, 37% of patients were seen within 14 days. After our series of interventions related to streamlining and standardising the appointment booking process, 77% of patients were seen within 14 days and 100% of patients were seen within 21 days. Conclusion The changes made to the appointment booking process were reproducible, sustainable, effective and required no additional resources or funding. BMJ Publishing Group 2017-09-24 /pmc/articles/PMC5699116/ /pubmed/29450270 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000052 Text en © Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/ This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | BMJ Quality improvement report Schofield, Toni Duero Posada, Juan Foroutan, Farid Alba, Ana Carolina McDonald, Michael Linghorne, Meredith A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title | A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title_full | A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title_fullStr | A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title_full_unstemmed | A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title_short | A local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
title_sort | local quality initiative to improve follow-up times for patients with heart failure |
topic | BMJ Quality improvement report |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5699116/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29450270 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2017-000052 |
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