Quality Improvement
Quality Resources
The Academy is committed to providing members with resources to promote the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. In health care, quality improvement (QI) is the framework you can use to systematically improve the ways care is delivered to patients. Below are some quality improvement tools that may help you and your practice succeed in driving change.
Quality Improvement Practice Management Webinars
The AAN's 2021 Practice Management Webinar series included three quality improvement topics. Each topic has brief, on-demand content to help improve quality for your patients. Additional topics will be released in 2022.
NOTE: You must be logged in to register and/or enroll in this program.
- Using Information to Improve Care with Drs. Laurice Yang and Allan Wu
- Providing Quality Care in a Telehealth Environment with Drs. Tracie Caller and Salvatore Rametta
- Informatics: The Nervous System of Healthcare with Drs. Allison Weathers, Melissa Yu, and many more
Quality Improvement TOolkit & Basics
Improve Basics
IHI Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA)
Quality improvement project planning form
Going Lean in healthcare
AHRQ Digital Workflow Toolsincluding Lean, Six Sigma, and 5S resources
Telemedicine resources
The AAN has a library of resources dedicated to the practice and implementation of telemedicine that includes tips on how to perform a quality televisit.
Improve Safety
Improve safety with AAN patient safety information and NeuroLearnSM. Additional tools can be found at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) for improving safety at the point of care, improving diagnostic safety through improved patient engagement, and during handoffs and signouts.
Improve Effectiveness
AAN Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) Online
EBM Online is a comprehensive online course to teach practical evidence-based medicine skills. Note: You must be logged in as an AAN Member to launch this course.
AAN Clinical Practice Guidelines
Improve Patient-Centered Care
Patient- and family-centered care organization self-assessment tool
IHI Patient-Centered Care Improvement Guide
Article: What is Patient-Centered Care?
Improve Efficiency
The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Agenda for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) co-developed a tool, TeamSTEPPS, to improve collaboration and communication about patient safety among healthcare providers.
The American College of Physicians (ACP) published a position paper in 2013 on clinical care teams. This paper provides a framework for team health care delivery.
Publishing Quality Improvement Successes
Not sure where to start when publishing your quality improvement (QI) project? The AAN developed a Roadmap to Publishing Quality Improvement Success. Follow these steps to position your project for future publication.
- Plan ahead when starting a QI project. Define the problem, identify objectives, and draft a goal statement. Define the problem, identify objectives, identify variables that can be measures, and draft a goal statement.
- Start your QI project using SQUIRE 2.0 to guide your project development and provide a framework for your project.
- Identify your aspirations and skills needed for the project early.
- Identify literature from similar projects, current guidelines, and systematic reviews.
- Create a specific aim. Describe the problem, discuss what is known, summarize models and/or theories explaining the project and intervention, and provide a rationale as to why the solution may work.
- Start your manuscript as your project evolves using SQUIRE 2.0 as a framework to develop your manuscript which will improve your publication odds.
- Describe the intervention. Understand the contextual elements, describe the intervention in detail and the team involved, discuss measures of intervention outcome and process, and provide statistical analyses.
- Enumerate the results. Describe the evolution of the intervention, detail process and outcome measures as well as conceptual elements, associations between measures, and missing data.
- Discuss the results of the intervention. Interpret the findings, compare the findings to prior published data, and describe impact on people and systems. Discuss study initiations and suggest next steps.
- Submit your manuscript for publication.
Clinical Informatics
Informatics is the science of information and the nervous system of health care.
Quality Measures