New Year’s Resolution: Planning for Improvement
Our office reopened on January 2nd 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.
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