Research & Tools

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Before embarking on an outreach trip, an organization should understand the needs of the local community. We developed a needs assessment tool using methodological triangulation to ensure appropriate resources and personnel are deployed for trips to improve site selection, expectation setting, and quality of care.  

Through our partnership with global outreach experts, we created a framework to guide quality measure development that incorporates the context of an outreach location, including the local infrastructure.

Collecting patient outcome data and measuring the impact of care is challenging. We've developed a process to improve outcome measurement and enable data-driven decision-making. 

Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) are used in the developed world to ensure safe patient care. We're developing an EHR (and process for implementation) for surgical outreach trips.

How did the patient do after surgery? What's the impact? Using a HIPAA-compliant, SMS-based platform, we are able to remotely collect post-operative patient outcome data.

Making sure care provided on a surgical outreach trip is of high quality is a priority. We've developed a portfolio of essential quality measures to help organizations measure and improve patient safety and the quality of care they deliver.

Benchmarking and measuring the impact of capacity building efforts may help improve local capacity and set goals. We developed a capacity assessment tool for orthoapedic surgery.