Key Metric # 1

Performance Tracking (selecting and reporting metrics)

Key metric # 1: prevalence of appropriate VTE prophylaxis

After reading the Analyze Care Delivery section, the diagram below should be pretty familiar. Though we used it earlier to understand care delivery, we use it now to measure care delivery.

Specifically, we’ll now look at this diagram to select metrics – meaningful and measurable steps you’ll use to track performance over time. In most instances the single-most telling metric is the prevalence of appropriate prophylaxis. Not only does it have the most causal relationship to the main clinical endpoint (hospital-acquired VTE), but it is also a sensitive indicator of how well the various care delivery steps come together.

Using the prevalence of appropriate VTE prophylaxis as one of your 2 key metrics will also give you something you can measure regularly and reliably. By setting up weekly or monthly data collection for this metric (see Section 3-3) you will have a reliable way to track performance of your changed care delivery system. What makes the clinical endpoint of HA-VTE so unsuitable as a lone metric for performance tracking is that events are too infrequent (and often sub-clinical or delayed in onset) for timely, useful feedback.

It should now be clear to you how the VTE protocol you drafted serves not just as the main ingredient for your improvement intervention, but also for the measurement system that will track your performance.

Download the VTE Implementation Guide Snapshot