How can clinical variation be reduced?

4 Steps to Successfully Reducing Clinical Variation

1. Identify Opportunity. Understand which areas are not meeting benchmarks, and dive into what actions and procedures are driving the variation in outcomes.
2. Align Initiatives.
3. Change Behavior.
4. Assess Outcomes.

What is health care variation?

Variation in Healthcare Is an Opportunity for Improvement Patients frequently present to clinics or hospitals with varying degrees of complexity and other unique circumstances. For example: Two patients present to the emergency department (ED) with pneumonia.

What are the benefits of eliminating clinical variations in the provision of healthcare?

By reducing variability of care, you can help in improving patient safety, reducing healthcare costs, and improving key performance indicators (KPIs) for both individuals and the healthcare system as a whole. A team approach can help you find viable solutions that can be easily implemented within your organization.

Why is measuring variation in health care important?

The use of health care can vary according to where people live. Understanding variation across geographic areas is important to improve the quality, appropriateness and value of health care provided to patients.

What is the cause of clinical variation?

Clinical variation involves the overuse, underuse, different use and waste of healthcare practices and services with varying outcomes. The U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, according to the most recent data from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

What is variation in clinical practice?

Clinical variation is a difference in healthcare processes or outcomes, compared to peers or to a gold standard such as an evidence-based guideline recommendation. Our work. Healthcare variation.

What is reducing variation?

Variability Reduction is a multi-part strategy to reduce product variation and make a product more robust or fit to use, e.g., meet its performance requirements regardless of variation.

What is unwarranted clinical variation?

Accordingly, we define unwarranted clinical variation as “patient care that differs in ways that are not a direct and proportionate response to available evidence; or to the healthcare needs and informed choices of patients.”

What is meant by the term variation?

Variation is the differences between individuals within a species. This can be caused by inherited or environmental factors. Variation can be continuous or discontinuous. Biology. Inheritance and genetics.

What are the two types of process variation?

There are two types of process variation:

• Common cause variation is inherent to the system. This variation can be changed only by improving the equipment or changing the work procedures; the operator has little influence over it.
• Assignable cause variation comes from sources outside of the system.

What is the process of variation?

Process variation happens when processes fail to follow a precise pattern. It’s a leading cause of quality issues both in transactional and production processes. When quality issues arise, the problem is often only identified once the issue has turned into a full-blown disaster.

What does clinical variation mean?

What does clinical variation mean to a hospital?

Clinical variation involves the overuse, underuse, different use and waste of healthcare practices and services with varying outcomes. The U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, according to the most recent data from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

How does standardized care help reduce clinical variation?

Standardized care that reduces clinical variation—defined here as the over-, under-, or unnecessary utilization of healthcare services and resources—has been shown to improve quality and outcomes in the ambulatory, acute, and post-acute settings.

How to reduce clinical variation to drive success?

Engaging physicians and implementing risk-adjusted analytics are two strategies that healthcare providers can use to address clinical variation. It is well-known throughout the business world that variation and a lack of standardization lead to poor quality and higher costs.

Why is variation a feature of contemporary medicine?

Variation in health care usage is a troubling feature of contemporary medicine. For similar populations, usage of medications, interventions and procedures may be very different and lead to variation in outcomes.