The Elephant in the Room: Documentation & Quality
Documentation was the elephant in the room at ACC's quality summit. Here's the deal, you can't improve what you don't measure, and strong documentation is crucial to any quality improvement effort. In fact, our poster study which examined 14 organizations where accreditation was initially deferred by ACE found 126 discrete shortcomings in documentation, accounting for 23 percent of all shortcomings across all categories of standards. At these under-performing organizations, failure to capture comprehensive documentation was a widespread issue.
But this all-important rationale can get lost when facing the reality that comprehensive and accurate documentation can be quite the chore for the cardiologist. But it's a rationale of which physicians should be constantly reminded—not only in educational resources (like our poster), but also in the quality improvement processes of health care organizations. At ACE, we strongly believe that when physicians can visually and procedurally see the results of effective quality improvement and QI communication in an organization, improvements founded on their strong documentation, they'd be far more likely to internalize the importance of what might currently be considered a bureaucratic chore. We should remember that we can all agree on, rally around, and we're all truly motivated by, improving the quality of care for our patients.
It has also been our experience that ACE accreditation can provide the impetus and supportive consultation required for organizations to build stronger data collection and quality improvement systems, and frankly build stronger communication between team members, administrators and physicians. ACE accreditation provides an ideal platform for your organization to carefully examine processes and systems while negotiating, with a supportive, third-party process, potential changes and improvements on a level where quality improvement is the only agenda. This is true for ALL organizations, even the best of the best.
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