Clarify Aims
Transform general goals into a metric-specific aim statement
Earlier, under Essential First Steps, the team set a purposefully ambitious general goal. Doing so gave a broad sense of the breakthrough success the team wanted to achieve.
In earlier sections of Track Performance we defined key metrics. With these metrics the team can now commit itself to accomplishing something specific. We highly recommend that you formalize that commitment in an aim statement.
Good aim statements articulate a stretch goal that is specific, measurable, time limited, and applicable to a particular population of patients.
The figure in the Track Performance, Key Metric #1 section shows an intermediate outcome (sometimes also called a “process measure”) and a clinical endpoint. Using the following examples, the team should now write an aim statement for the chosen metrics.
Intermediate Outcome: 95% of patients admitted to medical units 5G and 6G will be on appropriate VTE prophylaxis as defined by our protocol by October 31, 2009.
Clinical Endpoint: Reduce the rate of hospital-acquired VTE from the baseline of 1.2 events per 1000 patient days by half to 0.6 per 1000 patient days by October 31, 2009.
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