Abstract
BACKGROUND
The role of the hospitalist has evolved over the last decade, with hospitalists increasingly being asked to lead systems‐based initiatives to improve the quality of inpatient care. The educational strategy of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) includes development of practice‐based resources to support hospitalist‐led improvement in clinically important measures of hospital care quality.
OBJECTIVE
To develop a resource at the SHM Web site to present quality improvement (QI) principles for systems‐based care in the hospital and to help individual hospitalists improve specific patient outcomes.
DESIGN
The SHM defined the role of the hospitalist in QI, performed an assessment of the educational needs of hospitalists, and executed a Web‐based educational strategy to address these needs. The organization identified the most common cause of preventable inpatient deaths, hospital‐acquired venous thromboembolism (VTE), and prioritized the need to improve prophylaxis.
RESULTS
This new resource at the SHM Web site presents principles for conducting QI in the hospital. To enable learning that is practice based, the VTE Quality Improvement Resource Room (QI RR) features Ask the Expert, an interactive discussion community, and an original Improvement Workbook, a downloadable project outline and tutorial that hospitalists can use to guide and document steps in an effort aimed at reducing hospital‐acquired VTE.
CONCLUSIONS
This QI resource serves as a template for the development of subsequent hospital‐based resources. User feedback will refine the QI RR and its format so that similar offerings can target other significant inpatient problems. Additional research is needed to evaluate learning and the clinical impact of this quality improvement resource on hospital performance measures and patient outcomes. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2006;1:124–132. © 2006 Society of Hospital Medicine.