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URC Sponsors 24th ISQua International Conference
URC was proud to serve as one of the sponsors of this year’s International Society for Quality in Health Care, Inc (ISQua) Conference. The theme of ISQua’s 24th International Conference, held September 30 through October 3, 2007, in Boston, was Transforming Healthcare in the Electronic Age. URC is a Foundation Institutional Member of ISQua.
Dr. Jorge Hermida and Lani Marquez, MHS, both of QAP, offered presentations at this year’s conference on our work applying quality improvement methods in developing countries. The presentations explored how URC’s Quality Assurance Project (QAP), funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is using methods and tools to effectively facilitate the exchange of ideas worldwide and adapt healthcare innovations in low-resource settings.
Dr. Hermida’s presentation was titled Lessons from Improvement Collaboratives in Developing Countries: Findings of Field Evaluations of Quality Assurance Project-Supported Collaboratives. The field evaluations documented variations in how the collaborative approach was applied in different developing countries and outcomes of specific collaboratives. The evaluations found that the improvement collaborative approach is both feasible and desirable as a large-scale quality improvement methodology in low-resource healthcare settings. The key features characterizing collaboratives as an improvement methodology—efficiency of a single clinical focus, motivating teams, shared learning, generating new ideas for improvement, rapid results, intentional scale up—are as relevant in developing as in developed countries.
Ms. Marquez gave a poster presentation entitled Are Web-Based Platforms to Support Quality Improvement Feasible in Developing Countries? Experiences from Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Rwanda. A key force driving change and innovation in healthcare improvement collaboratives is the ongoing exchange of ideas and results across participating teams, who often work for different organizations in dispersed locations. QAP implemented two different web-based platforms designed for use by health care providers and program managers in one African and three Latin American countries. Findings concluded that both web-based platforms proved feasible and affordable to support quality improvement efforts of teams in developing countries. Collaborative managers and authorities at regional and national levels found the web-based tools particularly valuable for readily accessing results of the facility-based teams. However, motivating facility-based teams, even those with Internet access, to post and view data and improvement ideas on the websites remains a challenge.
The technical support URC has provided for quality improvement in a range of healthcare services continues under the new USAID Health Care Improvement (HCI) Project, the follow-on project to QAP.
Download
Lessons from Improvement Collaboratives in Developing Countries: Findings of Field Evaluations of Quality Assurance Project-Supported Collaboratives, J. Hermida, L.M. Franco, Y.S. Lin, T.T. Catsambas, M. Gutmann, L. Webb, and L.Marquez
Are Web-Based Platforms to Support Quality Improvement Feasible in Developing Countries? Experiences from Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Rwanda, L. Marquez
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