Frontline Innovation: Practice Enhancement Assistants (AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange)

Helping practices improve is a little bit like trying to repair
an airplane in mid-flight.
The practices have to continue to see patients during the process.
They can’t stop.
Our goal is to try to figure out the best way to help practices improve.
In the Well Child Visit Project, we had to opportunity to work
with a primary care practice.
We sent one of our practice enhancement assistants in to that practice.
The practice enhancement assistant observed that there
was a lot of dissatisfaction.
No one was happy.
The office manager had taken on too much burden,
was over-stressed, overworked.
The practice enhancement assistant was able to help her
try to figure out what the best roles would be for the staff who
were in the office and they were able to creatively identify
appropriate roles for the other staff,
develop some training programs for staff and also some ways of
appropriately evaluating staff.
The morale of the staff and the physicians in the practice
improved dramatically.
It was like night and day.
They now have a relationship with this practice enhancement
assistant, who has continued to work with them over time on
subsequent projects.
The practice is now more changeable because of her intervention.
This practice was able to increase the rates of
appropriate Well Child Visits from seventy percent to ninety
percent and the quality from fifty percent to ninety percent.
My name is Jim Mold and I believe that given the
opportunity we can all be innovators.