Building Your Medical Home: Understanding Quality Improvement

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Medical home transformation is a quality improvement process.​​

​The process of becoming a medical home is a thoughtful and continuous one. Comprehensive understanding of quality improvement is the key to successfully evolving into a medical home.​

What is Quality Improvement?

Quality improvement (QI) is an approach to analyzing your performance and conducting systematic efforts to improve it. As such, QI is often a cyclical process.

Within a pediatric practice, the goal of QI is improvement in health care services and the health status of a patient population.

Implementing and Testing Change through a Quality Improvement Model:

Now that the team has assessed current activities and identified areas for change, a method for testing and successfully implementing ideas is needed.

The Model for Improvement​ provides such a method through an organized way to implement and test new ideas within a practice.​

Tools and Resources

Through the Model for Improvement, your practice should ask three basic questions throughout the transformation process:

Q: What are we aiming to accomplish?

A: A high quality efficient medical home.

How to Develop an Aim Statement
This downloadable form provides step-by-step instructions to assist your practice team in the development of an aim statement.

Set SMART Objectives
This webpage provides instructions on setting objectives which are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.​

Q: How will we know that a change is an improvement?

A: By ensuring that measurement strategies, tools, and procedures for each implemented change exist.

Plan-Do-Study-Act Rapid Cycle Improvement
Step-by-step instructions for the implementation of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles within your practice. PDSA Cycles are a key part of the Model for Improvement and allow for rapid cycle improvement and change implementation.

Plan a Test of Change
This downloadable form allows your team to conduct and document your own Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle.

Improvement Planning Form
This downloadable form allows your team to identify, organize, and plan your necessary steps for change.

Q: What changes can your team make that will result in improvement?

A: Building Your Medical Home can be used to conduct multiple change ideas in the key functions of a medical home:

• Family-centered care
• Coordinated care
• Management of patient populations