There has been shortage of standardized quality and patient safety metrics and benchmarking in the urgent care industry. Most other specialties have registries, quality groups, or benchmarking organizations that aim to coalesce data and provide a framework around benchmarking for industry best practices. In July of 2019, the Urgent Care Quality Group was created to help foster dialogue that identifies the key issues of quality and patient safety in our industry and paves the way for actionable improvements, develop standardized metrics and a process for periodic measurement of data, derive benchmarks from data contributed by participating organizations, and publish results and revise metrics in keeping with the changing urgent care industry. Phase 1 of this work was completed at the end of 2019, identifying 10 quality and safety metrics, as well as early benchmarking data. Phase 2 will revise these metrics and identify a larger group of participating platforms.
Learning Objectives:
Articulate the current scenario for standardized quality and patient safety metrics for the urgent care industry.
Describe the objectives of the Urgent Care Quality Group (UCQG), and the rationale for development of this organization.
Introduce the 10 metrics identified through phase 1 work of the UCQG, and why each metric was included and what we learned through the data acquisition process.
Explain the relevant benchmarking that has been developed through our data analysis.
Breakdown the challenges associated with initial phase 1 data acquisition and analysis, and objectives for moving into phase 2.
