Guiding Questions
Data Analysis and Quality Improvement Initiative Proposal
This document is designed to give you questions to consider and additional guidance to help you successfully complete the Data Analysis and Quality Improvement Initiative Proposal assessment. You may find it useful to use this document as a prewriting exercise, an outlining tool, or a final check to ensure you have sufficiently addressed all the grading criteria for this assessment. This document is a resource to help you complete the assessment. Do not turn in this document as your assessment submission.
Analyze data to identify a health care issue or an area of concern.
- What data does your institution gather? (Or, what data were provided in the media piece?)
- What is the quality of the data, and what can be learned from it? What does it tell you? What is missing?
- What is an organized way of looking at different data outputs?
- What metrics indicate opportunities for quality improvement?
- What are the trends? (Existence of data does not necessarily equate to a trend.)
- What are the outcome measures? What information do you need to calculate specific rates?
- Assess the stability of processes or outcomes. Are the outcomes fairly predictable? Identify any problematic variations or performance failures.
- Include the selected data set that was analyzed in the proposal. This could be a table or chart.
Outline a quality improvement initiative proposal based on a selected health issue or area of concern and supporting data analysis.
- What benchmarks align to existing quality improvement initiatives set by local, state, or federal health care policies or laws?
- What quality initiatives currently exist (if any) related to the selected issue? Why are they insufficient?
- Identify target areas for improvement.
- Define what processes can be modified to improve outcomes. You may find it helpful to review models for quality improvement initiatives in Week 4.
- Identify evidence-based strategies to improve quality.
- Evaluate quality improvement initiatives on the selected health issue with existing quality indicators from other facilities, government agencies, and non-governmental bodies on quality improvement.
- Analyze challenges that meeting prescribed benchmarks can pose for a heath care organization and the interprofessional team.
Integrate interprofessional perspectives to lead quality improvements in patient safety, cost effectiveness, and work-life quality.
- Define interprofessional roles and responsibilities as they relate to the data and the quality improvement initiative.
- How would you make sure that all relevant roles are fully engaged in this effort?
- What non-nursing concepts would you incorporate into the initiative?
- How would outcomes to measure the effect of the intervention affect the interprofessional team?
- Briefly reflect on the impact of the proposed initiative on work-life quality of the nursing staff and interprofessional team. How is work-life quality improved or enriched by the initiative?
Apply effective communication strategies to promote quality improvement of interprofessional care.
- What kind of interprofessional communication strategies will be effective to promote and ensure the success of this performance improvement plan or quality improvement initiative?
- What types of communications would you recommend in addition to writing?
- Are there any communication models (CUS, SBAR) you would include in your initiative proposal?
Deliver a persuasive, coherent, and effective audiovisual presentation. Integrate relevant sources to support arguments, correctly formatting citations and references using current APA style.
- Is your analysis logically structured?
- Is your analysis 7–10 PowerPoint slides, with speaker notes (not including title slide and attached reference list)?
- Is your writing clear and free from errors?
- Did you use a minimum of five sources? Were they published within the last five years?
- Are they cited in current APA format throughout the plan?
- Have you included an attached reference list?
