Assessment 1
Applied Informatics Project Plan for Quality Improvement in Healthcare
This document contains:
Assessment requirements.
Project Domain and QI Strategies (Attachment 1)
Assessment Templates (Attachment 2 – For part 1 & part 2)
Evaluation Plan Formatting Requirements (Attachment 3)
Criterion-Referenced Assessment (CRA) guide that markers use to grade the assessment task. (Attachment 4)
Assessment Requirements
Task overview
Assessment name: Applied Clinical Informatics Project (Professional Plan)
Overview:
In today’s digitally enabled healthcare environments and the availability of large amounts of electronic data, healthcare professionals and managers need to understand where the data is coming from and how it can be used to effectively drive quality improvement. In short, design and execute informatics projects to improve the quality of healthcare services. Quality improvement (QI) is essential in healthcare to enhance patient experiences and outcomes, reduce the cost of care and improve health worker experience. Importantly, a quality improvement initiative requires a systematic and structured approach and without informatics, it is difficult to determine the impact of your QI initiatives or demonstrate your success.
This assessment piece provides you with the opportunity to demonstrate understanding of the concepts and strategies presented in unit materials and apply them to develop a data management and communication plans for an informatics project.
Learning outcomes measured:
1. Examine how health information is gathered, stored, integrated, analysed, communicated, and converted into knowledge to optimise health service delivery.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness and utility of complex technologies, e.g. patient scheduling tools and processes, to improve the delivery of care in contemporary healthcare settings.
3. Effectively communicate actionable insights from health data with diverse stakeholders
4. Work as a team member consistent with ethical and culturally safe professional practice in digitally enabled healthcare environments.
Length: Some tasks have a specific length (word count) specified with – +- 10% allowed in addition to that mentioned in the requirements.
What you need to do:
For successful completion of this assessment, you need to complete the following
tasks:
1. In Attachment 1 you will find the project context which outlines options for digital health-based quality improvement strategies that aim to reduce specialist out patient waiting times. Review this attachment and select an appropriate quality improvement intervention.
2. Gather and appraise existing evidence (literature) for your chosen QI Intervention.
3. Prepare an Applied Informatics Project Plan (see Attachment 2 for the detailed template) following the model for improvement framework. Learn more about the model for improvement here. The plan will include two principal components
a. A Data Management Plan providing guidance for data collection, storage and analysis activities that will be conducted as part of the project. Learn more about data management plans here.
b. A Communication Plan providing guidance for disseminating key information and findings related to your Informatics Project. Learn more about communication plans here.
4. Include a list of references/acknowledgements
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Resources needed to complete task:
Assessment Requirement Document (This document)
PUN108 Unit Website (for accessing materials regarding the assessment)
Microsoft Office Suite (For preparing the report and any related materials)
PUN108 Unit Website (for Submission)
Formative feedback Opportunities:
You will have the opportunity to receive feedback and discuss any questions in relation to the assessments during tutorial sessions scheduled throughout the semester.
You should endeavor to complete the tasks on an ongoing basis – along with weekly online lectures to ensure timely completion of the assessment and take advantage of engaging
with your peers and unit teaching team for timely feedback before final submission.
How will I be assessed: 50% of the semester – marking criteria outlined with this document
Formative/Summative: Summative
Submission information
What you need to submit: Applied Clinical Informatics Project (Plan)
Submission Format
A project plan (divided in two parts as per template) submitted in the form of a Word
document or PDF via Unit Website
Moderation: All staff who are assessing your work meet to discuss and compare their judgements
before marks or grades are finalised.
Academic Integrity
Students are expected to engage in learning and assessment at QUT with honesty, transparency, and fairness. Maintaining academic integrity means upholding these principles and demonstrating valuable professional capabilities based on ethical foundations.
Failure to maintain academic integrity can take many forms. It includes cheating in examinations, plagiarism, selfplagiarism, collusion, and submitting an assessment item completed by another person (e.g. contract cheating). It can also include providing your assessment to another entity, such as to a person or website.
You are encouraged to make use of QUT’s learning support services, resources, and tools to assure the academic integrity of your assessment. This includes the use of content matching software that may be available to assist with self-assessing your academic integrity as part of the assessment submission process.
Further details of QUT’s approach to academic integrity are outlined in the Academic integrity policy and the Student Code of Conduct. Breaching QUT’s Academic integrity policy is regarded as student misconduct and can lead to the imposition of penalties ranging from a grade reduction to exclusion from QUT.
Attachment 1
Project Domain & Quality Improvement Strategies
This attachment provides you with an overview of the context for your project and presents the possible quality improvement interventions which you need to choose from for developing your informatics project plan.
Project Domain – An Overview:
Referrals to in-hospital specialist clinics in Australia are received from GPs, community-based healthcare providers and inpatient units of health services. Patients can also self-refer for some allied health and maternity clinics. Due to the current shortage of skilled health professionals, demand for treatment is likely ton exceed supply, so that not all patients can be treated immediately.
Patients are added to a wait list for public treatment unless they are willing and able to pay for private care. In this respect, extended out-patient waiting times pose a significant challenge for patients in need of specialist evaluation and intervention. Delays in getting timely access to treatment negatively impacts healthcare service quality as it decreases patient satisfaction, extend periods of pain and discomfort, and creates uncertainty for patients. Worse, a patient’s health might deteriorate while waiting with an undiagnosed
condition.
In Queensland, there were more than 100,000 people waiting longer than clinically recommended on the specialist outpatient waiting list as of 1 January 2015. This was almost half of the 229,737 people who were on specialist outpatient waiting lists at that time (Naiker, 2017). As a key priority for Australian health services there has been significant interest and research in this area. However, depending on the procedure, urgency category and hospital attended, patients are still waiting months or even years longer than reported waiting
times.
The current outpatient KPI in the Performance Management Framework is the ‘% of unseen specialist outpatients waiting more than the clinically recommended timeframe for their urgency category (Category 1: 30 days, Category 2: 90 days, Category 3: 365 days)’ with each hospital and health service (HHS) supplying their own improvement trajectory.
In light of this ongoing problem, your organisation, the QUT Public Hospital (a fictional hospital) aims to provide specialist outpatient services in an efficient, coordinated. and standardised approach
Your Task (s)
In order for QUT Public Hospital services to achieve ‘seen in time’ targets, the hospital is investing in reducing the current specialist outpatient long waiting list. To achieve this, you are tasked with developing an applied informatics project plan with the broader aim: “To reduce outpatient waiting times from referral to appointment in a specialist clinic”.
In overview, the current specialist outpatient referral process is typically based on the determination of the patient’s GP for what medical treatment is required to treat the patient’s condition and symptoms. If the GP decides that the patient needs to see a medical specialist for an opinion, the GP will send a referral letter about the patient’s condition and treatment to the QUT Public Hospital.
The GP referral letter is reviewed and assessed by the hospital. If the referral is accepted, the patient is placed on an outpatient wait list to see a specialist. A specialist at QUT Public Hospital prioritises the patient’s need for a consultation and allocates the patient an outpatient urgency category. In Queensland, there are 3 outpatient urgency categories with recommended timeframes for consultation:
Urgent (Category 1) – specialist consultation recommended within 30 days of being added to the outpatient wait list.
Semi-urgent (Category 2) – specialist consultation recommended within 90 days of being added to the outpatient wait list.
Non-urgent (Category 3) – specialist consultation recommended within 365 days of being added to the outpatient wait list.
To ensure patients receive the most appropriate care within a clinically appropriate time frame, your submitted plan will be reviewed by the QUT Public Hospital quality improvement steering committee for its quality and alignment with the broader aim.
To develop this plan, you are expected to undertake following tasks:
1. Develop evidence-based understanding of the project domain – This will be accomplished by reviewing the evidence examining patient referrals to specialty outpatient care in public hospitals. This will enable you to familiarise yourself with the current problems and solutions in this area. We recommend the following two research papers to get you started but expect you will search and synthesize further recent evidence.
Time to wait: a systematic review of strategies that affect out-patient waiting times (Naiker, FitzGerald, Dulhunty, & Rosemann, 2018). This article reviews the published healthcare literature to identify evidence-based strategies for aligning resources, improving operational efficiency, and streamlining processes, which may provide improvements to specialist out-patient waiting times for patients. The article is available here.
A categorisation of problems and solutions to improve patient referrals from primary to specialty care (Greenwood-Lee, Jewett, Woodhouse, & Marshall, 2018). This article presents a narrative review to identify existing literature and provide a conceptual map that categorises problems with referrals from primary care.
The article is available here.
2. Select a Process Improvement Strategy – In order to select a strategy, we suggest you familiarise yourself with the strategies examined by Naiker, et al. (2018). They identified 26 separate strategies grouped into three consistent themes:
Resource alignment which focuses on managing demand through limiting the number of referrals, incentives, and triaging patients by other health care professionals.
Operational efficiency with time management strategies which maximise capacity within the clinics and may have a significant effect on the overall waiting times for patients.
Process improvement which focuses on strategies to optimise and streamline processes both tactically and strategically.
For this assessment, you will be required to select ONE strategy identified under the process improvement theme (listed in Table 1). We have also included links to relevant evidence for each strategy in the table to help you in getting started.
Process Improvement Strategy Options
According to the Naiker, et al. (2018), the strategies that had the most effect on waiting times were automation of processes like scheduling with eReferrals, telemedicine and patient text messaging.
Simulations in healthcare have also been implemented with varying levels of success. Therefore, you will select one of the following process optimisation strategies below for your QI initiative. Click on the author link to access the relevant article:
Table 1: Strategies to improve out-patient waiting times.
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3. Develop an Applied Informatics Project Plan: Using the template presented in attachment 2, you will develop a detailed applied informatics project plan for your selected intervention. The project plan comprises deliverables which must be submitted by the two milestone due dates.
The deliverables include:
Milestone 1 (Part 1) – Due: WEEK 6, 30th August (Friday), 11:59pm
3.1. Describe the proposed process improvement strategy, its context and background.
3.2. Develop a data management plan describing the data requirements for your process improvement initiative organised into three categories of measures:
Outcome Measures linked to the aim of the project (aim can be more specific in terms of timeframe and improvement amount if you require and you can justify)
Process Measures linked to the changes you are proposing to achieve the aim
Balancing Measures to identify any unintended consequences.
There are no universal rules about what data you need to collect and how you need to go about it – it simply must meet the needs of your selected initiative. However, you must be able to provide a rationale for your choices. Please refer to online materials for an overview of quality measures and planning a quality improvement project.
Milestone 2 (Part 2) – Due: WEEK 11, 11th October (Friday), 11:59pm
3.3. Develop a results dissemination plan – the general objective of a communication and dissemination strategy is to ensure that the status, results, and deliverables are known to all project members and available to all key audiences and target stakeholders. For this assessment, you will be focusing on how you plan to disseminate the findings of your process improvement initiative to a specific stakeholder group of your choice. Please refer to online materials for an overview of interpreting data and communication strategies.
Attachment 2
Applied Informatics Project Plan – Templates (Part 1 & 2)
Title Page
Assessment Part 1: Applied Clinical Informatics Project Plan
(Background and Data Management Plan)
Student Name
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Total Word Count: [Insert overall word count for your assessment]
1. This is a template to guide you on how to structure your informatics project plan on your choice of quality improvement strategy. This template is to clarify the overall expectations in terms of content and structure of the plan.
2. The suggested word counts are approximate, and you can be flexible to adjust that as per requirements of your report, however exceeding overall word count is not permitted (word
count does not include reference lists and appendices).
3. As this is an evidence-based plan, references to appropriate literature are very important.
Please use Vancouver format for your references – for details please see CiteWrite.
[Title: Choose a meaningful title for your project]
BACKGROUND (250 words approx.)
– What is the background of your proposed process improvement (PI) initiative? – Problem it is going to solve or help to solve
– Introduce the key background concepts by referring to the appropriate literature.
YOUR PROPOSED IMPROVEMENT STRATEGY (300 words approx.)
– What is the overall goal of your initiative?
– What is your proposed PI initiative and what is the aim this project intends to achieve?
– What is the current state of the art for this strategy as described in the literature?
– Explain briefly all the elements (people, technologies, processes) that are part of the context in which this type of PI initiative is likely to be used.
– Describe the process of implementing the QI initiative (can be presented as diagram or a process map)
DATA MANAGEMENT PLAN – (2-3 pages – following the formatting guidelines)
– PURPOSE (50 – 80 words): Briefly describe the purpose of this section and introduce the structure for readers to understand.
Presentation Tip: Use planning templates to succinctly present the data requirements (use appropriate citations as needed)
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Title Page
Assessment Part 2: Applied Clinical Informatics Project Plan
Results Dissemination Plan
Student Name Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
1. This is a template to guide you on how to structure your informatics project plan on your choice of quality improvement strategy. This template is to clarify the overall expectations in terms of content and structure of the plan.
2. The suggested word counts are approximate, and you can be flexible to adjust that as per requirements of your report, however exceeding overall word count is not permitted (word
count does not include reference lists and appendices).
3. As this is an evidence-based plan, references to appropriate literature are very important. Please use Vancouver format for your references – for details please see CiteWrite.
Overview
Good dissemination and communication strategies need to be a carefully planned process that involves considering the target audience, the message you want to get across and the communication strategies that will help you achieve this.
To plan the dissemination of the results of your quality improvement initiative, you are required to complete the following:
– Identify the goal or objective of your communication plan.
– Identify one target audience from the list in the template. You will need to identify who they are, what their current perceptions are, as this will determine what their preferred way of receiving information is.
– List the key messages suitable for the target audience, the messages should include the ‘call to action’ message, and any messages to counter negative campaigns.
– List the dissemination options you will use with a list of channels and appropriate materials.
– Identify sensitive issues which might be contentious for individuals or organisations in consideration of the political context and also any potential impact on the government.
Establish an evaluation plan outlining how you will assess the effectiveness of your communication strategy.
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Attachment 3
Applied Informatics Project Plan – Format Guidelines (For Both Parts)
Overall Format Guidelines:
Page numbers and footers: All pages should be numbered.
Title/Cover page: The report should have a cover page with the title of the report, the student’s name(s), and the TOTAL word count. The cover page does not count toward the total word count.
Length: You are allowed +/-10% for the overall word count without penalty. You must put the TOTAL word count for your assessment item on the cover page. The word count includes ALL the words in the body of the text, including referencing in the text and subheadings. It does not include the words on the cover page, reference list at the end or any attachments/appendices.
Headings: Please use headings in your report as required.
Margins: Please do not use margins less than the default margins for Word documents of (2.54 cm top, bottom, left and right).
Font and spacing: Please do not use font less than Calibri 11 or Arial 10. Spacing in any parts of the report should not be less than 1.15.
Appendices: Please include appendices only if necessary and clearly support your research report. Appendices are not part of overall word count.
Spelling: Australian/English spelling is required. Please ensure your spell check is on English
(Australia).
Reference list:
Referencing is compulsory. Make sure to reference appropriately wherever required. Do not use the Wikipedia or other indirect sources as your references. Please refer to the direct resource from where you have gathered the information.
Please format your references according to the VANCOUVER, further details about the format are available at:
https://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/cite/qutcite.html#vancouver
The reference list should always be placed immediately after the main body of the document (i.e. before the appendices)
Attachment 4
PUN108 Applied Informatics Project Plan – Marking Criteria
(Total Marks – 50)
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