Launched in 2017, following a day-long UT System Quality Retreat, the Quality Collaborative uses data to identify and illuminate areas of potential improvements across the UT System and share best practices with the goal of being the best in the country.
“During that retreat, Dr. Bela Patel, Dr. Will Daniel and Dr. Gulshan Sharma got together at the coffee table and asked what more could we be doing with the data,” said Dr. Robert Murphy, Associate Dean for Applied Informatics and Associate Professor at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the Physician Lead for the Quality Collaborative.
Since then, the collaborative has used data from the Vizient Quality and Accountability Clinical Database and a quarterly opportunity analysis to do deep dives into a variety of topics including mortality, safety, effectiveness, efficiency and equity - all the elements of the Vizient Clinical Database.
“Two years ago, we did a session on what we called Safety Plus,” said Murphy. “It really focused on the safety domain and a couple of clinical efficiency metrics. Last year we did service line deep dives. We went into every service line in the Vizient database, and this year we've decided to kick off this UT-HIP Sepsis Collaborative that we are calling UT-MOST.”
The University of Texas – Managing and Optimizing Sepsis Treatment program will look at Vizient risk-adjusted sepsis mortality at UT System owned and affiliated participating institutions by focusing on key measures with “strong evidence” to reduce mortality. The “strong evidence” will be pulled from the Surviving Sepsis Campaign in 2021. The program will identify key personnel at each campus, assemble currently collected metrics and definitions, consider developing standardized metrics, evaluate early recognition and predictive tools and share best practices.
“This will be the first time we will be working on an actual performance improvement effort to not just look at the outcomes, but also the evidence-based process measures that will lead to improved outcomes,” said Murphy. “Sepsis is a very important disease state that we need to manage and optimize.
“This project will also help us utilize EPIC data across all of our sites and to get some normalization of how data is collected, managed and reported consistently in the UT System.”
With the commitment to improvement evident across the UT System, the membership of the Quality Collaborative has quickly grown with nearly 60 invitees meeting biweekly for about 30 minutes. Aside from the topics the collaborative does deep dives in, Murphy says it has also opened a space for sharing.
“I do hear time and time again that people met somebody on the collaborative, they called them one on one behind the scenes to learn how they did something or how they're solving a problem, and that's the benefit of having such a wonderful system,” Murphy said. “We enable those relationships, we enable that sharing.
“Something I am already so impressed with about the UT-MOST program is people's commitment. Everyone seems excited with the possibilities and willing to share.”
Murphy also notes that while the Quality Collaborative is constantly seeking ways to improve, it is important to note the current success.
“Our institutions are actually performing quite well, but they literally aspire to be the best. So everyone is above average, but really, we aspire to be the best and that's what we continue to strive for.”
