Division Wide Projects

Internal Medicine-Pediatrics is committed to fostering an environment of discovery and improvement. By using a data-driven QI framework, this team’s research has the potential to reduce variation, decrease redundancies, and improve the quality of services and health care.  The division has many QI projects that involve the faculty, researchers, and residents.  The following are a few examples of the recent work.

Pediatric Developmental Screener

Physicians in our division work in many offices across UCLA, and most of the offices have physicians from different specialties. One part of quality improvement is to reduce variation of care across different sites, and this includes the use of uniform validated pediatric screeners. The division developed a dashboard to monitor the use of these questionnaires, and to help its physicians troubleshoot clinic-specific obstacles of using them in regular clinical practice.

Temporal Relationship Between Immediate Care (IC) Visits and Emergency Department (ED) Visits

Our division is examining the relationship between patients seen in the IC and then again in the ED within 72 hours. There are many possible reasons for this association, and often the timing is just coincidental as the ED visit may be for a condition unrelated to the initial IC visit.  By examining this relationship, the division can learn from its physicians and suggest changes that will support the physicians to provide the right care at the right time at the right place.  This project is a partnership with Dr Vladimir Manuel in the CPN division of UCLA. We are utilizing many of his tools, including dashboards that monitor this association, and help with analysis of the outcomes of any interventions.