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Dr. Margaret “Gretchen” Schwarze and Anne Buffington from the Wisconsin Surgical Outcomes Research Program (WiSOR) recently published Question Coding Schema: A Toolkit to Count and Categorize Questions During Surgical Consultation. The toolkit is a measurement tool for characterizing the number and types of questions patients and family members ask during surgical consultations. It enables researchers to count and describe the categories of questions that patients and family members ask while meeting with their surgeon. View the toolkit on HIPxChange here.

Dr. Maureen Smith, Director of Health Innovation Program at UW School of Medicine and Public Health recently published the Health Innovation Program DRG Categories toolkit. The goal of this toolkit is to categorize the readmission of patients discharged to a SNF from an inpatient stay by grouping those patients into diagnosis-related group (DRG) clusters based on the joint likelihood of readmission and discharge to a SNF. This toolkit contains an Excel worksheet with the mappings from MS-DRGs to corresponding categories.

UW Primary Care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative was featured in an American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) news article highlighting their recently published article titled “A Simple Framework for Weighting Panels Across Primary Care Disciplines.” Read the AAFP article and interview with co-author Dr. Sandra Kamnetz here.

To read the publication, click here.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are an issue of public health importance, as approximately 722,000 people are afflicted by an HAI every year (1 in 25 hospitalized patients) and 75,000 people with HAIs die. Daily bathing treatments with chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) for hospitalized patients is one evidence-based intervention targeting HAIs. However, it is often challenging to implement these daily bathing treatments widely across an organization.

Mammography screening is essential for early detection of breast cancer. However, guidelines vary on recommendations about the age and interval at which women should start receiving mammograms.

These conflicts arise from analysis of various observational studies and clinical trials that compared the benefits and harms of different screening recommendations, and drew variable conclusions.

The PROKids team, led by Elizabeth Cox, MD, PhD, received new NIH funding to develop standard guidance for the use of pediatric PROMIS metrics in ambulatory clinical populations.  In collaboration with leadership from prominent child health advocacy organizations and delivery systems nationally, as well as other PROMIS experts and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research Dissemination and Implementation Program, PROKids will interview healthcare stakeholders to understand, and ultimately address in the guidance, the challenges and opportunities of assessing pediatric population health with patient-reported metrics.     

HIP collaborates annually with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) to sponsor a learning event on topics of current importance to health in Wisconsin. This year's event will showcase several national and state models that are successfully expanding access and integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings. HIP Investigator Rachel Grob will be speaking about HealthExperiencesUSA and the DIPEx methodology to elevate the patient voice in healthcare. The assembly will be held on October 16 at the Monona Terrace in Madison. Learn more and view the agenda for the assembly here.

Dr. Pascale Carayon, the Procter & Gamble Bascom Professor in Total Quality in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Dr. Maureen Smith, professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Family Medicine & Community Health, were recently awarded $2.5 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to create a patient safety learning lab.