Obtaining Institutional Support

Your team needs support from your medical center leadership to enhance your improvement effort. Getting institutional buy-in and administrative support is essential. Although you may not yet have robust data, the rationale for directing resources toward ACS efforts can be spelled out. With ACS, you will likely be able to use data already being collected for the CMS core measures and/or PQRI measures, which will provide the baseline data you can use to convince the medical center leadership of the importance of this project. Given the financial resources required to support an ACS improvement effort, you should probably skip ahead to  Building the Business Case for Your ACS Improvement Efforts, so you can argue that ACS improvement efforts can be cost effective. A direct line to administrative support for your effort, either by a direct reporting structure or by involving a senior administrator in the team, should be in place before you go any farther.

TASK   

Meet with members of your administration and have prepared “talking points” and, ideally, some preliminary information you’ve collected demonstrating the need for the administration’s attention. Review the information in A Draft Memo to Administration or Executive and  Building the Business Case for Your ACS Improvement Efforts to help you convince your administrative leaders of the importance of supporting a program to improve ACS care in the hospital. Include local data you have collected as you see appropriate, perhaps using ideas for early data collection from View What’s the Problem? Ideas for Early Data Collection.

Download the institutional support task sheet