Step 1: Assess Your Practice and Collect Baseline Data
A brief evaluation of how your office currently functions can help you identify areas where you can make small changes to integrate specific activities into your practice. Your practice can demonstrate a commitment to improving patient care and facilitate patient-centered conversations with an environment that supports your efforts.
In addition to assessing your practice’s current functionality and infrastructure, you’ll need to conduct a patient chart review to assess your practice’s performance on relevant process measures. Examples of assessing process measures might be asking questions such as: “How many patients received information about the prevention/patient care practice?” or “How many patients declined specific prevention/patient care practices?”
1. Assess Your Practice Environment and Systems
2. Determine Process for Collecting Baseline Data
To understand how your practice is currently conducting its prevention efforts, you will need to conduct a baseline chart review on a random selection of patients meeting criteria for your topic. The number of patients selected will be determined by the practice and the scope of the project. If you have an electronic health record (EHR) that is capable of retrieving and reporting administrative and clinical data, you can do a retrospective data pull to obtain your baseline performance.
When conducting retrospective chart reviews, refer to the measure specifications to determine who satisfies the goal (numerator), and who your eligible patients are (denominator).