A well-managed Quality Improvement process is important within Primary Care to help drive improvement in patient care with scarce resource.

However, managing Quality Improvement can be difficult if you don’t have the right tools to support the individual practices and teams within your PCN.

That’s why it’s beneficial to have a digital system to help manage Quality Improvement and make it quicker, easier and more effective than it currently is.

What is Quality Improvement?

A Quality Improvement process is about making sure that you continuously improve the delivery of a safe, effective and patient-focused healthcare that is responsive, timely and cost-effective. It’s about always looking for ways to ensure you’re giving your patients the best care and working on improving it.

The CQC framework is a good basis on which to evaluate and target where changes will bring the most improvement and have the highest impact.

As well as this, you can also add your own improvement targets based on your practice’s core values.

There might be something that gets a lot of patient complaints or something you’ve noticed regularly makes your job a little bit harder. You can add changing these things to your Quality Improvement plan.

Quality Improvement Problems in Primary Care Networks.

Individual practices within PCNs often have their own way of managing things. This makes sense as a solitary practice, however, a PCN brings different practices together to improve collectively, to bring a wider range of services to patients and to operate at scale. When this happens, different ways of working and managing the same process make improving as a whole harder, as everyone is pulling in several directions instead of towards the same goal at the same time.

On top of this, there is the added problem of managing the quality improvement process. This process may be supported with a diaspora of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or paper. Filling out paper forms is incredibly time-consuming as you may be answering questions irrelevant to what you’re looking into, and the finished product could get lost or go unused.

Paper forms, Word documents and Excel Spreadsheets are all harder to understand and collate that digital systems, as they’re all separate and there’s no easy way to pinpoint problems that need fixing without spending a lot of time comparing these documents, a pain which is multiplied according to the number of practices within a PCN. There is also no easy way to create an improvement plan of action and monitor the progress of this plan.

Paper files or spreadsheets can take time to update if changes are necessary, especially when implementing these changes across the multiple practices that make up a PCN. These changes can also take vast amounts of time, making the process lengthy and complicated. This can make Quality Improvement so much harder than it needs to be, leaving improvement plans to be discarded altogether.

Paper documents, files hidden in computer folders and separate ways of working are no longer the answer. So, what is?

What’s the answer?

What’s needed is a system that can house all of your Quality Improvement information in one easy-to-use and quick-to-access place that lets users see all the relevant information easily.

Quality improvement plans can be overwhelming. It may seem like there’s too much to do and you’ve got no idea on what to prioritise. Using the CQC assessment framework and how you’re performing against each area helps understand what criteria you need to be aiming for, where you currently are and how far away you are from your target in each area, enabling you to identify your current weakest area and to prioritise it.

From identifying priorities, you can put a plan of action in for improvement. From here, you will be able to track the progress of the improvement plan and know when you’re going to hit your target or what you need to do to get back on track if things have gone slightly askew.

This system also needs to be fast and easy to use, save time, money and staff resources and encourage and engage all staff members. Your teams need to be confident in using the system, so a simple, intuitive one is crucial to make sure everyone is comfortable with it.

Oversight from InPhase.

Oversight from InPhase is a quality improvement system for healthcare providers and is already making a difference in Primary Care spaces, such as helping Mayflower Medical Group take their CQC ratings from Inadequate to Good in six months, by making the already incredible hard work of their teams easier, faster and more understandable.

To learn more about Oversight from InPhase, schedule your time with an expert, today.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.