Continuous Quality Improvement Initiative
Target Identification
The first step is to pick a process or service on which to focus. Good projects have many of these characteristics:
• The target is important
• The target is visible to patients
• Improvement in the target process has a high likelihood of making a difference
• There is room for improvement
• Measures are possible and able to be collected without severe disruption of day-to-day operations
• The organization has control over all major components of the target.
All of the QI Team should be involved in picking the project focus. It may take several meetings to agree.
You can read more about [QI Tools] to assist in target selection by clicking on any of the following links.
Once you have picked a target, you have to analyze the key factors and/or steps that contribute to the process selected. This means gaining an understanding of how it is done now, where the variability may be, and which steps or contributing factors are the weak links where things break down. It may take the team several discussions or observations to agree on these components.
Choosing which vulnerable step or factor to focus on first can be the next challenge. You can’t measure everything, and if you implement interventions for multiple steps at once it will be hard to know which intervention(s) actually had an impact. Sometimes it is a good to idea to measure several steps and use that data to assist the team in choosing the spot around which to design an intervention.
