Michael H. Kanter, MD, a research scientist with Southern California Permanente Medical Group, and chair of clinical science and professor at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine in Pasadena, CA, and a colleague recently summarized the efforts to improve best practices adoption that were reported at Kaiser Permanente’s 2019 National Quality Conference.
In addition to the E-SCOPE (Evidence Scanning for Clinical, Operational, and Practice Efficiencies) system that identifies new best practices, Kaiser Permanente created a medical education program to encourage the adoption of quality improvement initiatives. At the time of its report, Kaiser Permanente had more than 130 ongoing quality improvement projects.
More than 5,000 physicians had received Maintenance of Certification credit for the projects, the report says.
“New ways of educating future clinicians will embed quality improvement into the medical school curriculum from day one. The KP School of Medicine just received preliminary accreditation from the Liaison Committee for Medical Education and will be accepting its first class to start in 2020,” they reported.
“As part of the curriculum, students will be required to perform scholarly work, which may include quality improvement projects,” the report says.
“Other medical schools also promote such activities, although the KP system is perhaps uniquely suited to excel in this arena because of our integration, access to data, and ability to spread and scale good practices.”
Kaiser Permanente also uses embedded researchers in quality improvement projects.
“In this case, researchers join quality improvement teams from the beginning and bring their analytic skills to the project. This participation improves the rigor with which the project is conducted and evaluated, and increases the likelihood of publication and spread,” the report says.
“Organizations can also bring this same discipline to study the spread of best practices. By more precisely understanding the factors that improve the identification and spread of these practices, we can continue to improve care.”
The report is available online at: https://bit.ly/2WCM9oU.
