Intermountain Healthcare is one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare providers in the Intermountain West. Intermountain provides hospital and other medical services in Utah and Idaho. Intermountain’s Quality and Patient Safety Plan is a framework that provides guidelines on monitoring, assessment, and improvement of the quality and safety of patient care delivered.
The Quality & Safety Plan
Intermountain designs the Quality and Patient Safety Plan to support the systematic organization-wide approach. The plan also supports the organizational mission of providing clinical experience at reasonable costs while progressively improving patient outcome. The core purpose of the Quality and Patient Safety Plan is to guide participants in the provision of care and to:
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Achieve optimal patient outcomes and patient and family experience
Support and participative and safe workforce
Improve suitable utilization
Lessen the risks and hazards of care
Advance the best medical practices
The structure of the plan includes the organization background, an introduction to the plan, guiding principles for quality and patient safety, guidelines for governance and leadership, improvement plan, and communication strategies with every participant.
Improvement and Evaluation
Intermountain plans to measure and monitor quality outcomes and implement the necessary changes based on set guidelines. The plan sets out the following guidelines for improvement and evaluation:
Use reporting to perform risk assessment
Performance analysis and comparison based on internal trends, similar processes in other organizations, benchmarking techniques, and use of the statistical process.
Identify any gaps using the Institute of Medicine (IOM) criteria
Implement quality improvement cycles with all relevant stakeholders
The plan also provides on reporting, communication, and data analysis to help in the identification and prioritization of organizational initiatives.
Conclusion
The Intermountain Quality & Patient Safety Plan is very unique in that it includes guidelines for communication not only with internal participants but also the external participants. The plan guides on communication with patients, families, medical staff, contracted service providers, and students. The guidelines are specific to each of these participants in ensuring they understand the relevant issues relating to quality and safety of patient care.
