Healthcare Quality Improvement Service Areas

What We DoProgramsPatient Safety

RAZR works with a multitude of organizations and hundreds of hospitals to decrease patient harm and increase quality and safety of care for patients nationwide.  RAZR’s focus on decreasing healthcare associated harm aligns with many of CMS’s 19 Meaningful Measures domains such as Healthcare-Associated Infections, Prevention and Treatment of Opioids/Substance Use Disorders, and Decreasing Hospital Readmissions and Eliminating Disparities.  These measures serve to improve outcomes for patients, their families and providers while also reducing burden on clinicians and providers.

RAZR’s team collaborates directly with hospital leadership, clinicians, community leaders, academicians, patients, and their families on the areas of harm listed below.  RAZR’s team utilizes data analytics to help pinpoint the areas of opportunity within an organization then works side by side with them to bring about improvement in the care they give.  In addition, RAZR addresses additional forms of harm that are problematic for our providers and hospitals including hospitals serving vulnerable populations.  Our goal is to increase patient safety with a focus on reduction of harm.

RAZR’s emphasis on training and equipping hospitals in becoming high reliable organizations coupled with their goal of providing organizations opportunities to network with their peers has brought about effective improvements in the quality of care and management of resources.  When working with stakeholders, RAZR employs a variety of rapid cycle process improvement strategies, provides process improvement tools and resources for their use, and helps in the development of protocols to maximize the hardwiring of best practices.  Because no two organizations are alike, RAZR employs an individualized strategy in every improvement partnership and constantly reevaluates that strategy as progress is obtained, nationwide policies are implemented, and the healthcare climate evolves.  This agility allows RAZR to serve their clients in an effective and responsive manner.

Areas of Harm:

RAZR adapts CDC’s Core Elements of Antibiotic Stewardship to measure and improve how antibiotics are prescribed by clinicians and used by patients. These Core Elements offer providers and facilities a set of key principles to guide efforts to improve antibiotic use and, therefore, advance patient safety and improve outcomes.

Under a final rule, CMS mandates all acute care and critical access hospitals participating in Medicare to have antibiotic stewardship programs by March 30, 2020. RAZR aligns our efforts with the National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistance as well as utilizes the Targeted Assessment for Prevention (TAP) strategy provided by the CDC to further target our interventions.

We offer evidence-based guidelines and interventions to assist hospitals in focus areas of early detection of C. Difficile and prevention of transmission, promotion of best practices in hand-washing and decontamination strategies, and the reporting of timely and actionable quality improvement metrics.  We also facilitate the inclusion of other Multiple Drug Resistant Organisms (MDROs) in hospitals’ action plans, such as vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

RAZR Strategies