Tag Archives: PI

Performance Improvement

How Often Should My Trauma Operations Committee Meet?

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In my last post, I discussed how often your multidisciplinary trauma performance improvement committee (PI) should meet. As you know, one other mandatory committee is required of all trauma centers, the Trauma Operations Committee (Ops). In this post, I will:

  • describe how often your operations committee should meet
  • help you determine whether your two committees should meet on the same day or separately

How Often?

The short answer to this question is practically the same as for your PI committee, “it depends.” Whereas the PI committee schedule is determined more by the volume of your performance improvement activity, your ops committee is driven by its agenda.

First, look at what items are on your typical agenda:

  • Reports
  • Announcements
  • Policy discussion and revision
  • Marketing and outreach planning
  • TQIP report analysis
  • System issue analysis
  • Workgroup reports
  • Other stuff

Now, think back to your previous meetings. Do you sometimes have to cancel due to a lack of agenda items? Do you struggle to keep to the time allotted and frequently go over it? These are your biggest clues that let you know that you need to adjust the meeting frequency,

In general, your ops committee frequency is reasonably predictable from your trauma center level:

  • Level I – monthly
  • Moderate to high volume Level II – monthly
  • Lower volume Level II – bimonthly
  • Level III – bimonthly to quarterly
  • Level IV – quarterly

However, the agenda is really what drives meeting frequency. If you have a very active ops committee or are a “young” trauma center, this group may be very busy and need to meet more frequently than this. Base your final decision on your level of “busyness.”

To Combine Or Not Combine?

Combining your PI and Ops committee meetings has several pros and cons.

  Pros:

  • Decreases the number of meetings for everybody by one
  • Easier scheduling for attendees and venue
  • Consolidates agenda planning for the trauma admin team

  Cons:

  • May lead to loooong meetings
  • Frequently results in a less predictable start time for the second meeting
  • Requires extra administrative effort to maintain separate minutes and content
  • Often involves required attendees changing between meetings

Consider the logistics and personalities involved in your committees carefully. Do the attendees value shorter meetings with a predictable start time? Or do they just want to power through and take care of all of the business at hand?

Bottom line: First, determine the ideal frequency for your operations committee meeting. Is it the same as your PI committee? If so, consider combining them. If not, you will probably be forced to live with separate meetings. It is possible, however, to be creative. Consider a monthly PI meeting combined with the Ops meeting every other month.

What is the usual combined duration of the two meetings? If it is more than 2 hours, I recommend not combining them. That is just too long for your attendees to stay focused. If you can combine them, then look at the specific attendees for each meeting. Are they mostly the same? If they are, you are more likely to be successful when combining them. Reach out to your attendees to see if they would welcome a single meeting date and time. But warn them that it will routinely be 1.5 to 2 hours in length.

Now, plan your agendas carefully. If you have a substantial number of attendee changes between meetings, figure out how people will know when to show up for the second. It is easiest to have the smaller meeting first, and then add attendees when the second one starts. As for timing, there are two choices: always make each meeting a fixed length, or limit your first meeting to an exact length and allow the second to start at a fixed time and have a variable duration.

Finally, make sure the contents and minutes of the two meetings are separate. This keeps your documentation clean and easier to follow.

Performance Improvement

How Often Should My Trauma Multidisciplinary Performance Improvement Committee Meet?

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Every trauma center is required to have two specific committees: a multidisciplinary trauma performance improvement committee (PI) and a trauma operations committee (ops).  However, a common question is, “How often do my committees need to meet?” Let’s start with your PI committee.

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” There is no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all answer. In this post, I’ll review the six factors you must consider when designing your meeting schedule.

Total Patient Volume

The number of patients seen at your center directly impacts your PI committee meeting schedule. The more patient encounters, the more likely that performance issues will arise and the more likely that some will need to be aired at the full committee meeting.

PI Issue Volume

What is the total number of PI items that your program identifies over time? Busy Level I centers may find five or ten items
every day!

In contrast, an average Level IV center may only find a PI issue to pursue every few weeks. This has a noticeable impact on how often these items need to be escalated, analyzed, and discussed at your PI meeting.

PI Issue Severity

What fraction of your PI cases actually require discussion by the full committee? How many can be processed and closed by the Trauma Program Manager alone (primary review) or with the Trauma Medical Director (secondary review)? Only complex cases that require the input of multiple liaisons actually need to go to the committee.

Alternate review pathways

There are more options for review other than the primary and secondary pathways mentioned in the previous paragraph. Typical options would be direct correspondence with a liaison for simple one-service issues or discussion (and good documentation) from a morbidity and mortality conference. The use of these alternatives will reduce the number of potential cases for your PI committee and decrease the overall number of meetings needed.

Age of your Trauma Program

Are you part of a mature, long-standing trauma center? Or is your program newly minted by the American College of Surgeons or state designating agency? Newer centers benefit from sending more items to the PI committee to build engagement of the liaisons and other attendees. More frequent meetings help get them used to the review process and the frank but friendly discussions required for effective PI review.

PI Committee “Leftovers”

How often do you need to table issues or cases until the next meeting because you ran out of time? If you are chronically short of time to discuss all the agenda items, it’s time to either make the meeting longer (groan!) or schedule them more frequently.

Bottom line: These six factors listed above must be considered when choosing your meeting schedule. Here are my starting suggestions for the ideal frequencies for adult trauma centers:

  • Level I – monthly
  • Moderate to high volume Level II – monthly
  • Lower volume Level II – bimonthly
  • Level III – bimonthly to quarterly
  • Level IV – quarterly

Most pediatric centers admit lower volumes and less complex patients, which usually only warrants a bimonthly meeting.
Remember, these are starting meeting frequencies only.
If you are a new trauma center, consider more frequent meetings for your first year to get your attendees used to and invested in the process. And if you need more cases to fill the meeting or have more hold-overs until the next meeting, adjust your calendar appropriately.

In my next post, I’ll cover this same topic for your trauma operations committee.

Performance Improvement

Nuances Of The “Unanticipated Mortality” Classification

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All trauma centers verified by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) are required to classify trauma patient deaths into one of three categories: unanticipated mortality, mortality with opportunity for improvement, or mortality without opportunity for improvement. I’ve provided some details about each of those over the past several posts. But I do want to provide a little more detail for the much dreaded “unanticipated mortality.”

You may have noticed that unanticipated mortality does not seem to come in the same two flavors as the anticipated mortality: with and without opportunity for improvement. Why is this? Does this imply that all unanticipated mortalities have some opportunity or another? I actually used to think so.

But over time, I’ve changed my mind. It is true that the vast majority of unanticipated mortalities involve one, and many times, several opportunities that may improve the outcome for similar patients in the future. But I have personally seen at least two that did not.

How can this be, you say? Let me give you a far-fetched example. A healthy young male is involved in a car crash, sustaining fractures of a few ribs which are very painful. He is admitted for pain control, and is treated with your usual regimen of analgesics, mobilization, and pulmonary toilet. He admits to no significant medical or surgical history and is taking no medications. As he is sitting in his room waiting for his ride on the day of discharge, a small meteorite plunges through his window and strikes him in the head, killing him instantly.

So where’s the opportunity? Put meteorite shielding around your entire hospital? I think not. Don’t be ridiculous, you say, that’s not a realistic example. But what if, on the day of discharge, he stands up in his room and keels over in PEA arrest? An autopsy is performed, and a massive pulmonary embolism is identified. And let’s say that this patient somehow met your DVT prophylaxis criteria and he was receiving appropriate management per your practice guideline. And when you convey these findings to the family, they seem to recall a pattern of pulmonary embolism deaths and DVT complications in other family members. But nobody mentioned this to you during the history and physical exam. And you treated them exactly according to your protocol.

So what do you think now? Is there an opportunity? I still think not! But you must still pick apart every bit of the patient’s care, trying to identify anything that was not done according to plan or protocol that may have led to this (extremely) adverse outcome. But be aware that over your career as a trauma professional, you will likely run into one or more of these cases that are unanticipated but completely nonpreventable!

Performance Improvement

Trauma Mortality Nomenclature: Part 3

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Time to (nearly) finish up this series on trauma mortality! We discussed the two types of anticipated mortality previously, now it’s time for the final (and worst) one.

Old nomenclature: preventable death
New nomenclature: unanticipated mortality

Note the subtle difference. The old name presumes you could have done something about it, which can lead to legal issues in some cases. The new one implies that death was unexpected, but does not presume that it could have been prevented. However, in most cases analysis shows that it could have.

Any unanticipated mortality should launch a full investigation from the trauma performance improvement program. In some cases, hospital quality may need to get involved. A root cause analysis may be indicated, depending on how many factors are involved. These cases must be discussed by the multidisciplinary trauma PI committee, at a minimum. It’s essential that everyone involved do their homework and become familiar with every aspect of care so that a meaningful analysis can occur at the meeting.

Trauma center reviewers will expect to see detailed documentation of the analysis in the PI committee minutes. And unless the death was a complete and unpreventable surprise there should be new protocols, policies and practice changes apparent. If these are not present, expect major reverification issues for your trauma center.

Is there an appropriate ratio of the three types of mortality? Obviously, there is a fair amount of variability. But after years of doing reviews, I can offer some guidelines. Here’s my 100:10:1 rule of thumb:

  • 100 cases – mortality without opportunity for improvement
  • 10 cases – mortality with opportunity for improvement
  • 0-1 case – Unanticipated mortality

If your hospital’s numbers are outliers in any group, your clinical care and performance improvement program will get extra scrutiny. If all your cases are mortalities without OFI, then your PI process is too lax. This is a complex business, and there a many ways to improve our care. If your mortality with OFI cases are too frequent, your threshold for improvement may be set too low (see my previous post). If you have more than 1 or 2 unanticipated mortalities, then there may be some serious care quality issues.

Bottom line: When reviewing trauma mortality, be realistic but brutally honest. We learn from the mistakes we make. But by adhering to the process, you should never make the same mistake twice.

In my next post, I’ll provide some additional thoughts on unanticipated mortality.

Performance Improvement

Trauma Mortality Nomenclature: Part 2

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Yesterday I explained the most commonly assigned type of trauma mortality, mortality without opportunity for improvement (mortality without OFI). Today, I’ll cover the next highlest level.

Old nomenclature: potentially preventable death
New nomenclature: mortality with opportunity for improvement (mortality with OFI)

Again, these sound somewhat similar but they are quite different. Potentially preventable death used to be applied to patients who had obvious care issues that had some potential to change outcome. But it also contained a number of patients discussed yesterday who had support withdrawn due to age or degree of injury. There was some nagging doubt that, it something else had been done, maybe they would have recovered. So several of the “potentially preventable” deaths in the old category have been moved to the “without opportunity for improvement” category.

Unfortunately, a larger group of patients from the nonpreventable death category have moved into the “with opportunity for improvement” category. This is actually a good thing, though. The mortality with OFI category looks at whether there were any care issues, regardless of whether support was eventually withdrawn.

Whereas the vast majority of deaths at any center should fall into the mortality without OFI category, a modest number will be classified as with OFI, about 10%. The actual number depends on how broadly or narrowly an opportunity for improvement is defined. If you consider a few areas of missing documentation on the trauma flow sheet an opportunity for improvement, then you’ll have a lot of deaths classified this way. Concentrate on issues that might have actually had an impact on the outcome. The key is to develop a set of criteria that is realistic and that work for you. If the number of deaths with OFI seems high, go back and look at those criteria and adjust them. You can still work out a system for improving trauma flow documentation without it changing every death in a trauma activation to one with an opportunity for improvement.

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss that most dreaded category, the unanticipated mortality.