AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange Focuses on Surgical Care

Two of the featured innovations in the latest issue of AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange describe how medical centers in Vineland, New Jersey, and Birmingham, Alabama, redesigned processes related to surgical care by implementing the use of electronic systems. The changes led to reductions in surgical delays, better operating room utilization and increased overall efficiency. A third profile describes a hospital that established an innovative cross-division surgical quality group to identify opportunities for systematic improvement, leading to lower surgery-related mortality rates. The featured QualityTools provide resources and checklists to help hospitals deliver safer surgical care by reducing surgical infections, complications and related deaths and preventing wrong-site surgeries.

Learning Communities

The Innovations Exchange is expanding efforts to scale up and spread innovations by sponsoring three Learning Communities (LCs)focused on the following high-priority topic areas: “Making Hospital Care More Patient- and Family-Centered,” “Reducing Unnecessary Emergency Department Use,” and “Medication Therapy Management for At-Risk Populations.” Participants will work together in a collaborative group setting to adapt and implement innovation “clusters” that address their unique quality improvement needs.