HIV Quality Improvement in New York State
We are pleased to announce that the HIV Quality of Care Program within the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute has selected eight medical organizations to highlight on the ETE Dashboard for their achievements in HIV quality improvement: Apicha, Arnot Health, Mount Vernon Neighborhood Health Center, Northwell Health, NuHealth, Open Door Family Medical Centers Foundation, United Health Services (UHS) and Westchester Medical Center. Profiles of their recent work can be found here: Quality Corner – Ending the Epidemic.
The Quality of Care Program identified these quality improvement accomplishments through its annual HIV organizational treatment cascade reviews. These reviews, which began in 2019 for care provided in 2018, involve close collaboration between the AIDS Institute and medical organizations that provide HIV ambulatory care. Each year’s review includes data for approximately 85,000 unique persons living with HIV, submitted by about 70 organizations with over 200 individual HIV clinics across New York State. The Quality of Care Program provides an Excel template that facilitates the collection, validation and analysis of these data by the medical organizations. The template also provides space for the participants to describe their methodology, key findings, quality improvement projects and engagement of consumers in these projects.
Once the template is populated, providers can begin work on improving outcomes for subpopulations with lower rates for any of the indicators in the review, ARV prescription, viral load testing, viral suppression, resistance testing, linkage to care or frailty/functional status screening. At least one project directly related to the results of the review is required, but participants are encouraged to address multiple results or expand their quality improvement work to other projects that are relevant to the functioning of their clinics.
Through the collection and analysis of data and subsequent application to quality improvement projects, the participants identify and address problems related to documentation, timely delivery of care and disparities in outcomes. The reviews also enhance their capacity to query and analyze their record systems for other purposes.
The data submitted to the AIDS Institute also facilitate progress toward Ending the Epidemic and health equity goals through the development of a repository of patient-, clinic- and organizational-level outcomes that the Quality of Care Program can query for benchmark reports, in-depth analysis of outcomes and historical surveys of results for populations of special interest.