By Susan Yendro, MSN, RN, Associate Director of Measurement Coordination and Outreach, and Brandi Wamhoff, MPH, Associate Project Director
The days of combing through a long list of performance measures and deciding where to focus improvement efforts are coming to an end. The Accelerate PI™ dashboard tool is doing the heavy lifting for our accredited organizations.
Introduced for accredited ambulatory surgery centers in 2019, Accelerate PI is a dashboard representative of each organization’s relative performance on selected performance areas. The goal of this business intelligence tool is to visually display areas of improvement in a user-friendly format. The areas of improvement are not scorable elements on the survey, rather a springboard for discussions about quality improvement work. Surveyors and health care organizations have access to the dashboard, so conversations about improvement areas are more natural with the performance report at everyone’s fingertips.
What’s Included
The Accelerate PI dashboard features:
- A select subset with the most recent and available external data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Care Compare website that meets Joint Commission unique criteria for impact and actionability. Note: measure subsets vary by health care setting.
- For each measure, the dashboard shows an organization’s performance compared to national, state and Joint Commission accredited organization averages.
- Access to vetted national improvement resources that help organizations explore solutions to challenge areas.
Locating Accelerate PI Dashboards
The dashboard report is posted in the "Resources and Tools" section of an accredited organization's secure Joint Commission Connect® extranet site. Anyone who has access to Joint Commission Connect can view the dashboards.
Dashboard user guides are also available to increase awareness of the data contained in the dashboard reports and where to locate specific information. We developed the guides with FAQ records about what would help a health care organization interpret the data contained in the dashboard reports to ultimately improve quality and safety.
Challenging Issues in ASCs
On our end, one of the main advantages of the Accelerate PI dashboard is noticing which challenges many of our accredited ASCs are experiencing at any given time. If we know where performance is lagging industry wide, we can share best practices and help.
For ASCs, the greatest opportunities for improvement are those related to colonoscopy procedure follow-up, screening, etc. Fortunately, the dashboard allowed us to also learn about organizations excelling in these areas. We learned that Bluffton Okatie Surgery Center, LLC and Melbourne GI Center are high performers in colonoscopy practices. They shared their successes with their fellow accredited organizations in a webinar last spring (replay available here).
Participants learned about:
- evidence-based best practices regarding colonoscopy interval for high-risk patients in ambulatory health care organizations
- common performance and outcome challenges in colonoscopy interval for high-risk patients
- implementation of new best practices related to colonoscopy interval for high-risk patients to improve outcomes
These webinars illustrate the power of business intelligence technology in actually improving patient care. The Accelerate PI tool is available for free at your disposal. Take advantage of this opportunity to learn about where to focus your improvement efforts!
Susan Yendro, MSN, RN is Associate Director of Measurement Coordination and Outreach at The Joint Commission. She has worked at Joint Commission in a variety of roles for 14 years.
Brandi Wamhoff, MPH, is an Associate Project Director at The Joint Commission. Prior to this, she worked in various public health and private quality improvement roles.