Twice-yearly ImproveCareNow Virtual Community Conferences seek to connect and grow our widely distributed and diverse community in pursuit of our purpose to improve health and care for all children and youth with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. We invite all people wishing to learn more about and get involved with ImproveCareNow to join us on June 13 between 4:30 and 8pm ET for our Spring 2018 Virtual Community Conference. Read more to see the agenda for this event. 

ImproveCareNow is being highlighted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). AHRQ previously provided funding to help create enhancements of the ImproveCareNow registry, including automated population management, pre-visit planning, Quality Improvement performance and data quality reports. The efforts of physicians, improvers, parents and patients are also highlighted.

To improve at anything – be it your grade in history class or your best time at the 50-yard dash - you need to know how you’re doing. This can come in the form of a grade or where you finish in a race. Without this type of feedback, you can never be sure if you’re on the right track.

At ImproveCareNow, we want to provide the best pediatric and adolescent IBD care for all of our patients. To make sure that we are on the right track, ImproveCareNow centers receive regular feedback in several key areas related to IBD care. This information helps centers know how well they are reaching their goals and helps them make progress in areas that need improvement. (Click here to see an example of an ImproveCareNow Key Clinical Measures Report.)

In addition, ImproveCareNow centers have access to new tools that allow patients to provide feedback to the individual doctors and nurses who provide their care between visits—they want patients to be activated and ready to participate in their care.

Additionally, with the introduction of automated pre-visit and population management tools, doctors and nurses can be better prepared for visits. They can pinpoint areas that need attention and learn from the care provided by other providers at their center. The more timely the feedback, the sooner our providers can address aspects of your care.

We are excited to provide tools that help your doctors and nurses do a better job helping you achieve improved quality of life and better health!

[Editor's note: This post was contributed by Theresa Todd, MPH, MA.  Theresa is the Improvement Coordinator for Gastroenterology at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH and it is her responsibility to help the IBD team with quality improvement goals.  Theresa has been part of the Nationwide team since July 2010.]

The ImproveCareNow Quality Improvement (QI) Team at the University of Michigan has been working very hard at improving their QI processes. They now have had a long trend of improving remission rates from one population management report (PMR) to the next. But like good researchers, they had to ask themselves: is this a real improvement in disease status for our patients, or an artifact of better data?