Specialty-Based Ambulatory Quality Improvement Program: A Specialty-Specific Ambulatory Metric Project

Background and Objectives: Healthcare is increasingly being delivered in the outpatient setting, but robust quality improvement programs and performance metrics are lacking in ambulatory care, particularly specialty-based ambulatory care. Methods: To promote quality improvement in ambulatory care, we developed an infrastructure to create specialty-specific quality measures and dashboards that could be used to display providers' performance across relevant measures to individual providers and institutional leaders. Results: The products of this program include a governance and infrastructure for specialty-specific ambulatory quality metrics as well as two distinct dashboards for data display. One dashboard is provider-facing, displaying provider's performance on specialty-specific measures as compared to institutional standards. The second dashboard is a leadership dashboard that provides overall and provider-level information on performance across measures. Conclusions: The Specialty-based Ambulatory Quality program reflects a systematic, institutionally-supported quality improvement framework that can be applied across diverse ambulatory specialties. As next steps, we plan to evaluate the program's impact on provider performance across measures and expand this program to other specialties practicing in the outpatient setting.