Online Program

LI Course
Oral

Statement of Purpose and Institute Overview: The purpose of this course is to enable the learner to use design and implement continuous quality improvement (CQI) processes to improve performance on patient experience survey programs that rate and compare health care delivery systems and increasingly impact revenue and patient retention. Nationally, patient surveys are the most widely used tools for evaluating the quality of health care services. The most common instruments are from the family of Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys. CAHPS scores play an increasing role in accreditation and in CMS Medicare Star ratings, impacting the money and enrollments that health plans and provider groups receive. This emphasis on connecting revenue to quality of services, is designed to reward higher quality health care delivery systems and tacitly push poorer quality providers out of the market. Administrators at agencies and health plans are acutely aware of this process and increasingly search for staff skilled in methods to improve patient’s ratings of health care services. Inter-disciplinary skill-set: Effective use of the surveys in quality improvement inherently requires (a) analytic and assessment skills (problem formulation, measure definition, statistics, design and methodology); (b) project management skills, including financial planning and management of the survey process, and benefit-cost analysis of the measured effects; (c) leadership and system thinking about organizational processes that control the touch-points with medical providers and patients through which quality of services is determined; and (d) communication strategies adapted to those touch-points, as part of interventions grounded in the behavior sciences that cover motivation and change. Job descriptions in quality improvement frequently list duties and projects that imply this gamut of skills. It is rare, however, to find candidates with exposure or formal training in these skill-sets. The course draws on a few manageable elements of each of these skill-sets to teach how to create integrated quality improvement programs that interact with the survey process to initiate inquiry, identify causes, deploy interventions, and re-measure to evaluate effectiveness. The basic tool skills covered in the course are sufficient to design straightforward CAHPS improvement programs, and provide starting points to expand upon those skills. Qualifications: The instructor has managed the patient experience survey program in the nation’s largest public health plan from 2006 to 2015, and has delivered agency-sponsored briefings and invited presentations on this material at national conferences focused on the CAHPS surveys and quality improvement in Medicaid services.

Session Objectives: Demonstrate analytic and assessment skills by naming five steps in an analytic work-plan for continuous quality improvement (CQI) processes (done during an in-class exercise). Demonstrate organizational and systems thinking by diagramming (in a classroom exercise) an accountability matrix that crosswalks nine domains of service quality measured on CAHPS, to key stakeholders and process owners (departments) within a typical health care delivery system. Identify at least fifteen missing elements and flaws in a practical CAHPS quality improvement work-plan in a scored exercise during the course.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)