HiQuiPs (Quality Improvement)

In Education & Quality Improvement, HiQuiPs by Ahmed TaherLeave a Comment

 
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Are you starting a local quality improvement project in your emergency department? Or is there a safety issue that triggered an incident report? How about a new electronic health record system at your site that clinicians need to learn how to make the best out of? ED scorecards? A new system of audits? Have to complete a root cause analysis? So much change is happening these days in our complex emergency department environments, and it can be challenging to know where to look for information.

Welcome to our newest CanadiEM series: HiQuiPs, or as we like to pronounce it “Hiccups”. HiQuiPs is a series that will cover a wide array of topics within the intertwined fields of Health Informatics, Quality Improvement, and Patient Safety as they relate to emergency medicine. Our goal is to remove any hiccups from your workflow! We hope to disseminate this knowledge to help infuse our emergency departments with a culture of high quality, safe, and technologically advanced care.

There is a lot of interest from around the country about these topics. This year the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP) annual conference had an inaugural track called “Brag and Steal” that showcased the country’s best emergency department quality improvement and patient safety (QIPS) projects. A new abstract submission category for quality improvement and patient safety (QIPS) was also formed that attracted 68 submissions. Moreover, a new QIPS Award was started for the top QIPS abstract. We also expect an increasing number of submissions in the coming years!

Over the past two decades, the quality improvement and patient safety movements have traversed into healthcare from other industries such as manufacturing and aviation. More recently, the role of the patient experience and patient-reported outcomes in evaluation and improvement processes have also been highlighted. With our increasing reliance on technology for documentation, order entry, medication dispensing, patient monitoring, data housing, and beyond, an organized approach to understanding and applying health informatics is also needed.

Whether you are new to these fields or you have been working on projects for many years, the HiQuiPs series will be of interest to you. The series aims to introduce high yield and practical information. From basic theory to implementation approaches, as well as expert advice on key topics,  we hope to equip your toolkit with useful approaches that you can take with you to your next shift or project. Our plan is to introduce basic theory and build on it with practical advice, common mistakes, and fresh insights.

Each month a new post will discuss a high-yield HiQuiPs topic as it relates to emergency medicine. Our team comprises residents with formal areas of study in the aforementioned topics and experienced faculty from around the country. Our Senior Editorial team consists of Dr. Ahmed Taher, Dr. Lucas Chartier and Dr. Shawn Mondoux. Our Junior Editors are Dr. Mark Hewitt and Dr. Edward Mason.  Finally, If you have any topics you would like us to discuss please let us know! 

This post was copyedited by Paula Sneath and Matthew Hacker Teper

Ahmed Taher

Ahmed Taher

Ahmed is an Emergency Physician at University Health Network and Mackenzie Health in Toronto. He completed the Toronto FRCPC Emergency program, and a Masters of Public Health program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with certificates in Quality Improvement & Patient Safety, as well as Public Health Informatics.
Lucas Chartier

Lucas Chartier

Dr. Lucas Chartier is an emergency physician and Deputy Medical Director for the University Health Network (UHN) emergency department (ED). He is also UHN's inaugural Medical Director of Quality and Safety, the ED Lead for the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (TC LHIN) and the Chair of the Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (QIPS) Committee of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. With training at McGill (MD CM), University of Toronto (FRCPC) and Harvard (MPH), he now tries to spread the QIPS gospel in all the ways possible!
Shawn Mondoux

Shawn Mondoux

Dr. Shawn Mondoux is an emergency physician at Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) and faculty at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He obtained a masters of Quality Improvement and Patients Safety (QIPS) at the University of Toronto and serves as QI advisor to all projects within the ED. He has a strong interest in clinical QI work as well as the education of PGME learners in QI principles.