To ensure that patients who need medical interpreter services are served as quickly as possible, Steward St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, part of the Boston AF4Q alliance, has replaced beeper dispatching with an innovative use of hand-held technology. Staff medical interpreters now carry iPod Touch devices which alert them each time new requests for language services are made. The interpreters take cases from a digital queue while the intranet-net based dispatching system tracks their work flow in real time. Requests are sent only to the appropriate interpreters – for example,...
Before the AF4Q Language Quality Improvement Collaborative (LQIC), staff at Valley Medical Center in Renton, Wash., part of the Puget Sound Alliance, thought language services processes were hardwired, but discovered there were gaps – especially when it came to communicating the patients’ preferred language to clinical staff. In addition to making changes to their registration system, the team educated providers, added a language category to the daily census sheet, placed “I Speak [language]” reminders in patient charts and in the patient room, created an “...
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Health care is full of disparities. Federal data consistently show that minorities, women, and other groups consistently receive poorer quality care. However, the data does not indicate why this is. At Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, officials are using AF4Q-enabled data to track where exactly disparities lie within their institutions and formulate strategies for reducing these inequities of care.
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In a diverse community populated by Cantonese, Filipino/Tagalog, Laotian, Khmer, Korean, Samoan/Pacific Islander, and Vietnamese people, demographic data on “Asian” populations was insufficient. So International Community Health Services (ICHS) did a deeper assessment, resulting in a more detailed understanding of race and ethnicity data and key health concerns. Find out what AF4Q Puget Sound learned from this case study and others, and use their toolkit to...
To evaluate and reduce disparities in health care, health care providers and the organizations that work with them on quality improvement require certain data that can only be collected from patients. Minnesota knew if it wanted to analyze health care disparities statewide, the state needed a uniform data definition and a consistent collection and reporting methodology. So the Minnesota Community Measurement developed a handbook to support medical groups in data...
In March 2011, Tufts Medical Center, a member of the AF4Q initiative in Greater Boston, added a new field to the patient registration screen to record the patient’s preferred written language for health care information. All registration and admitting staff have been trained in collecting this new field and will begin asking patients on April 4, 2011. Since patients do not always speak and read the same language, Tufts Medical Center added this question to better meet their patients language needs—as it is often the simple steps that make a huge difference in providing quality...