Are there national collaboratives or initiatives related to your topic?
Are there performance improvement initiatives supported through the CDC on your topic?
Are there national organizations that have initiatives related to your AIM?
The Vermont Oxford Network is a leader in providing structured multi-institutional quality improvement collaboratives:
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) provides tools specific to improving the patient experience of care:
Does the federal Medicare program have a quality improvement initiative related to your issue?
Examples of regional collaboratives:
Other regional groups that may be working on issues related to your topic:
Consider the following resources to search for local data:
Critical appraisals are short summaries created to answer specific clinical questions. They can be found in point-of-care resources or may be published in journals.
DynaMed was created by physicians for physicians and other health care professionals. It contains clinically organized summaries for more than 3,200 topics. Some entries have a "quality improvement" section, usually near the end.
Essential Evidence Plus includes Daily POEMs ("Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters"), concise summaries of research that address clinical questions.
Review "Choosing Wisely" to find lists of evidence based guidelines and recommendations geared towards increasing value in healthcare and decreasing harm from overuse. Together these lists were generated by over 60 professional organizations, representing over one million providers.
The guidelines and algorithms found here will be helpful to midwifery students.