Development of a System to Measure and Improve Outcomes in Congenital Heart Disease: Heart Institute Safety, Quality, and Value Program

Background Achieving excellent outcomes for patients with congenital heart disease requires coordinated effort and resources, and a need has developed for a structure that facilitates improvement and measures cardiac centers' progress toward optimal patient care. Methods The Heart Institute (HI) at Cincinnati Children's Hospital developed a Safety, Quality and Value (SQV) program to formalize the use of quality improvement (QI) methods with the goal of optimizing patient outcomes, experience, and value. The SQV program adopted a conceptual framework that considers aspects of structure, process, outcome, and value in defining quality metrics, and the program used the Model for Improvement to guide design and implementation of QI interventions. Results In the first four years since its inception, the SQV program facilitated important improvements in clinical outcomes, cost reductions, and safety. In addition to achieving measurable improvements, the creation of a formal SQV program fostered a culture of transparency and accountability, providing a new structure for how the HI shares clinical data among clinicians, hospital leadership, and the public. Conclusion The creation of an infrastructure to strategically design, implement, and support QI efforts in a clinically busy pediatric acquired and congenital heart institute was successful in meeting its initial aims and is a promising approach and model for other programs.