Quality Improvement and Standardization
Quality improvement (QI) in emergency medicine is led by Eileen Murtagh Kurowski, MD, a Quality Scholars graduate and Pediatric Emergency Medicine faculty member.
QI work is supported by a multi-disciplinary team which includes faculty and staff physicians, fellows, APRNs, nurses and specialists in quality improvement, project management, and business intelligence.
Since the start of the clinical care algorithms work at Cincinnati Children's, we have implemented algorithms in collaboration with our primary care and sub-specialty colleagues that span eight clinical conditions including the following:
- Community-acquired pneumonia
- Evaluation for non-accidental trauma
- Evaluation for sexual abuse
- Acute asthma exacerbation
- Acute headache
- Low-risk ankle injuries
- Management of acute agitation
- Bronchiolitis
We have measures in place to track algorithm adherence (process) and patient care indicators (outcomes) and in many conditions have met or exceeded our targets.
Over the past years we have piloted and refined a process to design and implement additional care algorithms which will streamline and standardize this work across future teams. Multiple presentations and publications have resulted from this work.
