The Mihalik Blog

eHorizons

This is the era of the “e” as in eMail, eBanking, eCommerce.  You name it and someone has probably put an “e” in front of it.

We’ve done the same.  Some of you may know of The Mihalik Group’s eGlobe—the electronic version of our newsletter.  It used to be that our eGlobe was just a PDF of our paper Globe.  It was a convenient delivery format but not easy to read.  The new eGlobe comes as a series of short introductions to each article with a hyperlink to the full text on line.  There’s no need to scroll through an unwieldy PDF to find the second part of an article.  If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to sign up for our eGlobe. 

If you’re reading this, you obviously know about my Blog.  But if you’re one of those people who hasn’t mastered RSS feeds, we have a monthly eNews feature that’s custom made for you.  RSS feeds are intended to keep you updated on changes to web pages (such as blogs) but they’re not really easy to use.  And you still need to remember to DO something to get the information from the RSS feed.  Our eNews, delivered directly to your eMail inbox, contains links to recent blog posts and other topics of interest.  I find that I don’t remember to regularly check websites and blogs of interest to me—even though I want to.  We thought that delivering a reminder with hyperlinks each month was a good solution. 

If you sign up for the eGlobe you will automatically be included as a subscriber to The Mihalik Group’s eNews feature.

 

If you have any suggestions for improving our offerings—or if there are topics you’d like to see us write about in the Globe or in the blog—just let me know.  You can reach me here.

Managed Care Speaker Bureau

Forest Laboratories has launched a Managed Care Speaker Bureau. 

I spent the better part of two days last week in Coral Gables, Florida at the speaker training meeting.  The weather was beautiful—but in comparison to Chicago in January most weather is!

Among the topics I’ll be able to speak on as part of the Forest Laboratories Managed Care Speaker Bureau are:

§         Improving HEDIS Scores in Antidepressant Medication Management

§         Depression in the Workforce: Improving Recognition and Treatment

§         Pharmacoeconomics of Depression: Managing the Economic Impact through Improved Clinical Care.

Your Forest Laboratories representative should be able to arrange a speaking engagement if any of these topics would be of interest. 

New Year’s Resolution: Planning for Improvement

Our office reopened on January 2^nd after a year-end break. 

Late December into early January is a period when not much new happens in the areas of accreditation and regulatory compliance.  That makes it a very good time to plan for the coming year.  The quality improvement calendar is a critical part of the planning process—and one that I find is often not used to its full potential. 

The problem that I typically see is a timing issue.  QI program evaluations and revised program descriptions are typically not completed until late first quarter or early second quarter.  Many health care organizations include the annual QI calendar as part of the revised program description.  Consequently, the QI committee has not explicitly planned activities for the first three or four months of the year. 

As a New Year’s Resolution, I suggest you do away with treating the QI calendar as a once-a-year task.  Quality Improvement is a dynamic process and planned activities should be modified during the year based on new information. 

Set up your QI calendar in a table format.  Each activity should occupy one row.  Set up columns for the information you want to include, such as the name of the indicator, the responsible party, the goal, etc.  End your table with a series of twelve columns, one for each month.  In each of these cells, describe what should be happening during that month for the specific activity.  Leave the cell blank if nothing should be happening.  Developing a set of abbreviations will make it easier to maintain the calendar; things like M for measure, R for report to committee, etc.

On a regular basis, as you are preparing the minutes of the most recent QI committee meeting, add enough new columns to the calendar to project a full twelve months into the future.  In the new cells, describe what should be happening during each newly added month, if you know.  For example, if a particular indicator is reported on a quarterly basis, you can project out when the next reports will be due. 

Every three to six months, make the calendar update a specific agenda item for the QI committee.  With the committee’s input, revise the calendar to customize it to the reality of what is happening. That quarterly report you added might need to be revised if there’s some sort of a delay, for example.  If you schedule one of these calendar updates for the last QI committee meetings of the year, you’ll be starting the new year with the most up to date plan possible. 

Although it is easier to word process in a word processing program, using a spreadsheet program for the calendar will enable you to print just the columns that you want to print.  So, while your spreadsheet might have two years’ worth of planned activities, you can choose to print just the next twelve, without loosing the history.