How informatics support monitoring of nursing-sensitive quality indicator data.

The American Nursing Association (ANA) established the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®) in 1998 to track and report on quality indicators heavily influenced by nursing action.
NDNQI® was established as a standardized approach to evaluating nursing performance in relation to patient outcomes. It provides a database and quality measurement program to track clinical performance and to compare nursing quality measures against other hospital data at the national, regional, and state levels. Nursing-sensitive quality indicators help establish evidence-based practice guidelines in the inpatient and outpatient settings to enhance quality care outcomes and initiate quality improvement educational programs, outreach, and protocol development.
The quality indicators the NDNQI® monitors are organized into three categories: structure, process, and outcome. Theorist Avedis Donabedian first identified these categories. Donabedian’s theory of quality health care focused on the links between quality outcomes and the structures and processes of care (Grove et al., 2018).
Nurses must be knowledgeable about the indicators their workplaces monitor. Some nurses deliver direct patient care that leads to a monitored outcome. Other nurses may be involved in data collection and analysis. In addition, monitoring organizations, including managed care entities, exist to gather data from individual organizations to analyze overall industry quality. All of these roles are important to advance quality and safety outcomes.
Preparation
As you begin to prepare this assessment you are encouraged to complete the Donabedian Quality Assessment Framework activity. Quality health care delivery requires systematic action. Completion of this will help you succeed with the assessment as you consider how the triad of structure (such as the hospital, clinic, provider qualifications/organizational characteristics) and process (such as the delivery/coordination/education/protocols/practice style or standard of care) may be modified to achieve quality outcomes.
This assessment requires you to prepare an 8–10 minute narrated tutorial (with optional video) for new nurses on the importance of nursing-sensitive quality indicators. To successfully prepare for your assessment, you will need to complete the following preparatory activities:
• Review the nursing-sensitive quality indicators presented in the Assessment 04 -: Informatics and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators [PDF] Download Assessment 04 -: Informatics and Nursing Sensitive Quality Indicators [PDF]resource and select one nursing-sensitive quality indicator to use as the focus for this assessment.
• Conduct independent research on the most current information about the selected nursing-sensitive quality indicator.
• Interview a professional colleague or contact who is familiar with quality monitoring and how technology can help to collect and report quality indicator data. You do not need to submit the transcript of your conversation, but do integrate what you learned from the interview into the audio tutorial. Consider these questions for your interview:
o What is your experience with collecting data and entering it into a database?
o What challenges have you experienced?
o How does your organization share with the nursing staff and other members of the health care system the quality improvement monitoring results?
o What role do bedside nurses and other frontline staff have in entering the data? For example, do staff members enter the information into an electronic medical record for extraction? Or do they enter it into another system? How effective is this process?