CMS is mailing new Medicare cards to all people with Medicare. Please share this information.
Learn what the new Medicare cards mean for providers.
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TMF Recognizing
Physicians for Achievement in Quality
Improvement
TMF Health Quality Institute sponsors the Physician Practice Quality Improvement Award Program in partnership with medical associations in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico and Texas. Any practice in the state of Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and Texas with one or more licensed physicians providing care for Medicare fee-for-service patients is eligible to participate. Learn more about the upcoming 2018 - 2019 award program cycle and a few best practices certain award-winning physician practices have implemented.
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TMF Quality Improvement Exchange
TMF's Innovation Team has published a
new white paper
aimed at providing clinicians with strategies to reduce time spent on administrative tasks and increase their ability to focus on patients.
The new publication, titled "Reducing Administrative Burden: Refocusing on Patient-Centric Care," examines the etiology of clinician administrative burden, efforts to systematically identify and categorize those burdens and strategies to minimize the burden of administrative processes through patient-centric approaches to care.
The
TMF Quality Improvement Exchange also offers other publications with insightful commentary and scholarly analysis of relevant health care quality issues and topics. Please click on the links below to see the various informative resources provided by the TMF Innovation Team.
INNOVATION BLOG
Please also check out the team's newest
blog post
, featuring guest writer Clifford Moy, MD, TMF's Behavioral Health Medical Director, who discusses the stigma behind mental health conditions.
Also, enjoy and learn from previous blog posts by Russell Kohl, MD, FAAFP, chief medical officer for TMF.
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| Dr. Russell Kohl |
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Dr. Kohl works across the company to support quality improvement (QI) efforts, leads the Innovation Team and has served as lead physician for TMF's Comprehensive Primary Care initiative.
QI CASE SPOTLIGHTS Case spotlights feature case studies from TMF projects that highlight QI best practices.
QI SNAPSHOTS TMF's QI snapshots provide a quick synopsis on successes and lessons learned from important QI projects.
QI PUBLICATIONS TMF is pleased to share our latest QI reports, white papers and referred publications. We aim to disseminate important QI information to advance health care quality.
QI PRODUCTIONS (Videos). TMF presents improvement strategies in an engaging format to highlight exceptional transformation efforts.
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TMF Helps Reduce Hospital-Acquired Conditions
TMF is encouraged by recent data showing that our work, as well as the work of other health care quality improvement organizations across the country, is having an impact on patient safety, specifically a reduction in hospital-acquired conditions.
Examples of hospital-acquired conditions include adverse drug events, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, central-line associated bloodstream infections, pressure injuries and surgical site infections.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) points to data released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showing that those national efforts helped prevent an estimated 8,000 deaths and saved $2.9 billion between 2014 and 2016. CMS has designated TMF as a Quality Innovation Network Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO) for a region including Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico and Texas. TMF also supports two Hospital Improvement Innovation Networks (HIINs). Collectively, QINs and HIINs (formerly HENs) were both actively working to reduce hospital-acquired conditions during the 2014-2016 period.
The AHRQ National Scorecard on Hospital-Acquired Conditions estimates that 350,000 hospital-acquired conditions were avoided and the rate was reduced by 8 percent from 2014 to 2016. CMS has set a goal for the HIIN project of reducing hospital-acquired conditions by 20 percent from 2014 through 2019. Once the 20-percent reduction goal is met, AHRQ projects that during 2015 through 2019, there would be 1.8 million fewer patients with hospital-acquired conditions, resulting in 53,000 fewer deaths and saving $19.1 billion in hospital costs from 2015 through 2019, according to a press release by CMS.
TMF provides direct and tailored quality improvement consultation to hospitals to support their patient safety efforts and achieve quality improvement goals. TMF also designs learning curricula, facilitates virtual learning collaboratives to promote peer-to-peer sharing of best practices and group problem-solving, and produces educational materials for a variety of patient safety topics, such as hospital-acquired infections, readmissions, airway safety, hospital-acquired pressure injuries and adverse drug events. Additionally, physician and leadership engagement, disparities of care, and person and family engagement are interwoven with all patient safety topics.
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