Evidence Based Practice Essay Paper

Assignment: Evidence-Based Practice and the Quadruple Aim
Healthcare organizations continually seek to optimize healthcare performance. For years, this approach was a three-pronged one known as the Triple Aim, with efforts focused on improved population health, enhanced patient experience, and lower healthcare costs.

More recently, this approach has evolved to a Quadruple Aim by including a focus on improving the work life of healthcare providers. Each of these measures are impacted by decisions made at the organizational level, and organizations have increasingly turned to EBP to inform and justify these decisions.

To Prepare:

Read the articles by Sikka, Morath, & Leape (2015); Crabtree, Brennan, Davis, & Coyle (2016); and Kim et al. (2016) provided in the Resources.
Reflect on how EBP might impact (or not impact) the Quadruple Aim in healthcare.
Consider the impact that EBP may have on factors impacting these quadruple aim elements, such as preventable medical errors or healthcare delivery.
To Complete:

Write a brief analysis (no longer than 2 pages) of the connection between EBP and the Quadruple Aim.

Evidence Based Practice

Evidence-based practice (EBP) refers to the integration of best evidence from research, patient values and clinical expertise into decision-making processes within the health care environment. EBP is intended to enable health care providers (such as nurses) translate findings from research into clinical practice (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2018). EBP is recognized as a key factor for meeting the Quadruple Aim in health care, defined as: improving patient experience of care (including satisfaction and quality); improving the health of populations; reducing per capita cost for health care; and improving the work life of health care providers and reduce burnout (Sikka, Morath & Leape, 2015). Evidence Based Practice Essay Paper  In this respect, EBP helps to reach the Quadruple Aim as determined by the four measures of patient experience, population health, costs, and work life of health care providers.

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Meeting the objective of achieving the Quadruple Aim is a difficult exercise. With no perfect solution for achieving the four objectives in the health care system, EBP serves as a good starting point through presenting guidelines for organization. Firstly, EBP helps to enhance the patient experience through better care. The core of EBP is improving provider-patient conversation with a focus on effectiveness and efficiency. In presenting research evidence on what works best for patients, EBP augments expertise with experience from clinicians and patients to build a comprehensive model of real life provider-patient interactions. Clinicians who use EBP get to understand the common pitfalls of health care delivery and formulate strategies for how best to navigate challenging patient conversations to achieve the best outcomes (Sikka et al., 2015). Secondly, EBP helps to improve population health. EBP includes survey data collections that generate insight into population health characteristics. This information helps in understanding past and current population health events, and predicting future events. The information can then be used to design intervention that target specific aspects of the population (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2018; Sikka et al., 2015).

Thirdly, EBP helps to reduce per capita cost of health care through improving value. The tools presented by EBP helps with seamless data tracking. This function is useful for allowing providers to instantly assess their performance even as they track data across the health care system. This enables cost-effective implementations (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2018). Finally, EBP helps to improve the work life of health care providers. Changes with the health care system have typically been met with much skepticism since they increase stress, burnout and feelings of not providing quality care to patients, instead of easing provider burden as initially intended. EBP helps in identifying the right way to implement changes so that provider satisfaction is improved. EBP does this by engaging them differently with evidence that offers an effective and delightful change approach. For all medical personnel, EBP helps to shrink the gaps between building a knowledge base and testing that knowledge base in practice. Rather than practically testing new care concepts and approaches, medical personnel can now rely on EBP to eliminate the need for tests (Kim et al., 2016; Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt, 2018).

EBP is all about using the best available evidence to make clinical decisions that ensure the best outcomes. EBP helps to focus on patient engagement by building the required skills such as motivational interviewing so that providers can engage in better interactions with patients thus contributing to this objective of the Quadruple Aim (Crabtree et al., 2016). In this respect, EBP helps to reach the Quadruple Aim as determined by the four measures of patient experience, population health, costs, and work life of health care providers. As such, EBP should be the standard of care in health care systems to enable them achieve the Quadruple Aim objectives.

References

Crabtree, E., Brennan, E., Davis, A., & Coyle, A. (2016). Improving patient care through nursing engagement in evidence-based practice. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 13(2), 172–175. doi:10.1111/wvn.12126

Kim, S. C., Stichler, J. F., Ecoff, L., Brown, C. E., Gallo, A.-M., & Davidson, J. E. (2016). Predictors of evidence-based practice implementation, job satisfaction, and group cohesion among regional fellowship program participants. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 13(5), 340–348. doi:10.1111/wvn.12171

Melnyk, B., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (2018). Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice (4^th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer.

Sikka, R., Morath, J., & Leape, L. (2015). The Quadruple Aim: Care, health, cost and meaning in work. BMJ Quality & Safety, 24, 608–610. doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2015-004160 . Evidence Based Practice Essay Paper