Research Projects
As part of its Mission, the Institute serves as the coordinating center within BIDMC for innovative research targeted toward expanding and enhancing the application of quality improvement tools and techniques in health care. On-going research efforts include:
“Time-Varying Risks and Outcome Measurement: The Pernicious, Pervasive Patient-Day.”
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this research seeks to identify quality metrics which do not accurate reflect how risk varies as a function of time and across different phases of clinical care (such as falls per 1,000 patient-days) and how use of these metrics can lead to misleading or biased estimates of the effect of interventions. This research seeks to develop and validate a strategy for overcoming these limitations, leading to more reliable CQI measurement techniques for phenomena with time-varying exposure risk. Knowledge gained in this work will thus become part of the scientific literature and available to all.
“Program to Accurately Assess and Reduce Patient Harm”
Funded by the RX Foundation, this large 3-year grant award will advance our “Program to Accurately Assess and Reduce Patient Harm” and enables BIDMC to:
- broaden internal efforts to report all harm, evaluate contributory factors and assess opportunities for prevention;
- collaborate with IHI to conduct an evaluation of our systems for capturing harm;
- enhance our centralized repository for capturing of harm events, analysis and reporting; and
- create a robust mechanism for disseminating information about harm events and structures this information in a way that findings can be publicized to the clinical and academic communities.
“Making Ambulatory Procedural Care Safer: STAMP-Based Risk Assessment and Redesign – Model Validation”
Funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, this grant funds BIDMC’s initiative to design, implement and evaluate a series of interventions aimed at reducing the system pressures that create unsafe operating conditions within the ambulatory procedural domain. This grant supports development of a toolkit for use by other organizations, based upon the ideas tested and implemented at BIDMC.
