Quality Improvement Hub aims to enhance health care infrastructure across Ohio
By Tyler Griesenbrock
CATALYST scientific editor
Published June 9, 2023
The Ohio State University’s Quality Improvement Hub (QI Hub), part of an ambitious project with medical centers across the state, is nearing the transition from planning and development to implementation – and Principal Investigator Catherine Quatman-Yates, PhD, DPT, PT, and her team are ready to see what it can accomplish.
Facilitated through Ohio State’s CATALYST – the Center for the Advancement of Team Science, Analytics, and Systems Thinking in Health Services and Implementation Science Research – and supported by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center, Ohio State’s QI Hub is part of an endeavor to build statewide infrastructure that is focused on improving the delivery of health through coordination with QI Hubs at several other medical colleges across Ohio.
This infrastructure will use proven quality improvement methods such as those described in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Breakthrough Series to generate improved patient outcomes for patients who are publicly insured in support of the Ohio Department of Medicaid’s population health strategy.
“To my knowledge, this is one of the first efforts to really envision collaboration across all the medical centers and all the regions,” said Quatman-Yates, an associate professor in the Department of Physical Therapy in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and director for the Leading Improvement-Focused Teams for Advancing Health System Outcomes Lab (LIFT Lab). “We’re building a network that works all the way from the micro level of clinics and providers to the macro level of the Ohio Department of Medicaid.”
The QI Hub applies a learning health network that connects participating medical colleges to each other as well as with community-based, non-academic providers. Along with Ohio State, medical colleges at Case Western Reserve University, Northeast Ohio Medical University, Ohio University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Toledo, and Wright State University are taking part.
“There’s great learning that has been achieved, and even great results that have been achieved, but then it’s really hard to maintain,” Quatman-Yates said, adding that through the work of the QI Hub, “we’ll be able to more readily network across the state to advance and sustain QI efforts.”
To build out processes that promote quality improvement and improved infrastructure, the participating colleges will be focusing on specific medical conditions. By taking what has been learned and established on those topics and applying it to larger organizational structures, the QI Hubs can build the infrastructure needed to then apply what they learn to other conditions. The QI Hubs also have a strong focus on community engagement with a goal of reducing health disparities in health outcomes.
“Hypertension is the model on which we’re trying things first. We’re trying to take all the things we’ve learned in the hypertension space and focus on QI in this area,” Quatman-Yates said. “But it’s not just a hypertension project. It’s a new way to approach infrastructure.”
Using hypertension as an example, she explained that many health care providers and organizations are working with patients to improve blood pressure management, but they are likely doing it in different ways.
“We have a lot of work to do to take what’s already been done in this space and apply it across the board,” Quatman-Yates said. “Quality improvement has to be implemented at the local level. You have to be ready to adapt to the complexities of the local context. Even approaching this at a statewide level, you have to take all the local complexities into account.”
While the project concept envisions delivering measurable health improvement over a five-year time frame, this initiative is designed to establish quality improvement infrastructure and activity that is self-sustaining and integrated into lasting infrastructure, she said. The infrastructure the project puts in place will serve as a way to pool resources and knowledge across organizations to improve the quality of care in Ohio, with a focus on people who are covered by Medicaid or who have limited access to health care.
Although Ohio State’s effort is being directed through the College of Medicine, it is a joint project with the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. That intersecting partnership allows the project to directly fund nurses, social workers, and other providers as part of the infrastructure building process.
“We’ve been invested in the planning and development phase since October, and we’re beginning to transition to the implementation phase over the next few months, with the goal of having all the Ohio State primary care sites actively involved in the QI Hub within the next 18 months,” Quatman-Yates said.
For more information about Ohio State QI Hub, visit https://u.osu.edu/liftlab/our-work/lhs-qihub-medtapp/. For more information about CATALYST, visit https://go.osu.edu/catalyst.