A Shot of Quality Improvement!
Welcome to Immu-News, the Immunization Initiatives listserv, a monthly resource for the community of participants in this project.
All health care delivery organizations are required to have quality assurance and quality improvement programs, but it is often difficult to make these efforts really meaningful in the everyday practice of serving patients. This month’s Immu-News suggests a number of immunization quality measurements that you can adapt to your local setting. We are finding from our site visits that many of you really struggle with understanding who is getting immunized, who is missed, and what the root causes are for the gap between your goal of full immunization and the present reality at your center. Additionally, immunization data gathering is often very time consuming, often duplicated several times over for various outside agencies, and often not in step with the ways changes are made in other parts of your organization. Here are a few ideas from us, and we welcome responses back from you that will continually improve immunization practices.
Addressing the Big Four: On-Time Immunizations, Knowing Your Baseline, Making Improvement, and Accurate Records
Our four quality topics will cover:
- Immunization reminder systems
- Baseline immunization rate audits
- Measuring success
- Patient self-management in record retrieval
Resources