In partnership with Vital Statistics and the Department of Health and Human Services PQCNC will identify and implement leading practices around birth certificate reporting at the inpatient setting, establish a standard reporting plan for sites to adopt with sustainable auditing, and improve birth registry accuracy with focused variables transmitted accurately in 95% of records.
Accurate and timely documentation of births and deaths is essential to high-quality vital statistics. Information from vital records is critical to identify and quantify health-related issues and to measure progress toward quality improvement and public health goals. In particular, maternal and infant mortality serve as important indicators of the nation’s health, thereby influencing policy development, funding of programs and research, and measures of health care quality. These are critical to understanding quality, access to medical care, and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in maternal and infant health care. Without accurate birth certificate data, the capacity to effectively plan and deliver adequate services and allocate resources across all development sectors, is limited.
During the pilot phase PQCNC will work closely with 7 pilot hospitals to:
- Measure current effectiveness of reporting
- Build a Birth Certificate Perinatal Quality Improvement Team (PQIT) - each PQIT will include a registrar
- Create a process map of the birth certificate data collection
- Use the process map to identify opportunities for improvement and highlight apparent systems issues that may be barriers to accurate collection/reporting
- Educate staff on WHY accurate birth certificate reporting is so important
- Create specific action plan with supplemented with specific individualized interventions outlined to achieve goals
- Develop measurement and metrics for each site to track progress
- Provide direct support to each site utilizing QI methods for improvement
- Work 1:1 with registrars at each site providing individualized training
- Address issues that arise with coaching, collaboration among teams and support of best practices identified
- Develop a sustainable, solid reporting plan at the unit level consisting of continued mandatory training and internal auditing at close of initiative
