RadRobyn

I am new to Quality Improvement. I've been in my role for 8 months and we are in the process of training and making the switch from retrospective review to concurrent. Approximately 2/3 of our work will become concurrent while the rest (mostly those items that are sampled) will remain retrospective. Our staff have been divided into concurrent abstractors, retrospective abstractors, performance improvement coordinators, and an educator. I am interested to hear if anyone has gone through this process and if you have suggestions, ideas, or just comments on this. Because I am new to the department, I am open minded to a new process and my biggest fear is really finding my way around the hospital as my patient list may lead me just about anywhere each day. I am just "going with the flow" r/t the overwhelming amount of information we are learning with all the different databases. However, my coworkers are accustomed to abstracting only one database...for years sometimes and are quite anxious about the amazing amount of knowledge required to abstract for multiple databases (the 'abbreviated' training manual which included dictionaries for the databases was 5 inches thick!). One of the things that does not make sense to ME is how we will keep up with the case load concurrently...especially important because I am one of the concurrent abstractors and I am salaried. All I know is we will be responsible AS A GROUP to have all the month's cases abstracted by the deadline of the 5th of the following month. That's a little scary! Thanks for any insight you can share! P.S. As I said..I'm new and a lot of this is unknown territory, but here some of the databases I know I'll be responsible for are ACC-PCI (or NCDR...not sure how you say this?), STS, and CMS measures for inpatients. There are probably others but this hasn't been solidifed and/or I don't know :)

I am sure by now you have cleared this up for your institution (a whole year has passed!) but just for the sake of sharing, our hospital requires our IR suites to follow the same policies as the OR. It actually always did, but we recently started really enforcing it, probably about a year ago. Everyone wears hospital-issued scrubs (including inpatient staff who travel with their patient to our department) if they enter our suites. Everyone wears hat and mask (and of course lead if there will be flouro) and those approaching the field will also wear gowns, gloves, and eye protection.