In 2018, the cost of U.S. healthcare cost grew 4.4%, reaching $3.65 trillion (cms.org, 2018). However, despite this expenditure, the U.S. lags behind other developed countries in both the quality of care and patient safety (commonwealthfund.org, (Links to an external site.) 2017). The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act included the mandate to move healthcare toward quality, safe and cost-effective care. Advanced practice nurses must now be proficient in quality assurance/quality improvement activities to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes and to meet reporting requirements that impact reimbursement. Several new models have been identified for reform in primary care practice. The ANA has called for APRN's to take an active role in leading the improvement in care (https://www.nursingworld.org/~4af0e8/globalassets/docs/ana/ethics/new-delivery-models---final---haney---6-9-10-1532.pdf (Links to an external site.)). To ensure nursing has the future role described by the IOM, APRN's must be able to show they can take the lead in new models to advance healthcare reform.
The purpose of this assignment is to allow the student to demonstate their ability to apply the knowledge and skills learned in this module to 1) analyze QA/QI data, 2) use the data to compare nurse-led models with other models on quality performance, 3) identify priorities based on the analysis, 4) choose an appropriate toolkit to address the priorities and 5) develop a technical, scholarly written report on the findings based on the criteria in the rubric.
The survey of practice-level quality assurance and quality improvement activity (based on the National Quality Strategy (NQS) Levers) has been completed, and the data compiled. Below you will find an excel file with the compiled raw data and survey results. We suggest you don't print the Excel file pages as this is a scrolling spreadsheet designed to assist you in analyzing the data.