Quality Improvement

Quality Resources

The Academy is committed to providing members with resources to promote the highest quality patient-centered neurological 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 Toolkit & Basics

Improve Basics

IHI (PDSA)

Quality improvement

Going in healthcare

AHRQ including 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.

Access Resources

Improve Safety

Improve safety with AAN patient safety information and . Additional tools can be found at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) for , , and during .

Improve Effectiveness

 

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

AAN Quality Measures

Improve Patient-Centered Care

Improve Efficiency

The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Agenda for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) co-developed a tool, , to improve collaboration and communication about patient safety among healthcare providers.

The American College of Physicians (ACP) published a 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.

Download the Roadmap

  1. 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.
  2. Start your QI project using to guide your project development and provide a framework for your project.
  3. Identify your aspirations and skills needed for the project early.
  4. Identify literature from similar projects, current guidelines, and systematic reviews.
  5. 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.
  6. Start your manuscript as your project evolves using SQUIRE 2.0 as a framework to develop your manuscript which will improve your publication odds. 
  7. 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. 
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Submit your manuscript for publication.