At the 18th World Congress of Neurosurgery in Cape Town, Luis Rodriguez, M.D., a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, discusses QI tracking tools that have produced good results.
Hello, my name is Luis Rodriguez and I am a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Old Children's Hospital. Recently, I had the opportunity to present some of our work at the 18th World Congress of neurosurgeons in Cape Town, South Africa. My first presentation was about the development of a visual analytics tool that helps us track not only all our neurosurgical cases but also all that adverse events. This database and tool allow us to look at socio economic factors, demographic factors and other areas that may affect the outcomes in our patients. Related to the development of this database was my second presentation. A few years ago, the Armstrong Institute for patient safety and quality perform a review of our prog of our program. They found that the rate of adverse events in our neurosurgical program was about 20%. We instituted a large number of detailed quality improvement processes to try to improve our outcomes and to minimize complications in our patients. This database and visual analytics tool that we established helped us then identify whether our quality improvement processes were successful or not. I was able to report to the World Congress that the rate of adverse events in our practice came down from about 20% to less than 10% which is a pretty significant improvement. It allowed us to see that the quality improvement processes that we have established have made a huge improvement in our outcomes. The goal of this project continues to go forward to try to develop a predictive analytics tool that will help us identify which patients are at a higher risk for complication so that we may intervene before we take those patients to the operating room to decrease our complications and improve our outcomes.
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