Using Life QI to track improvement work across an ICS

The initiation of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) across the NHS provides a renewed opportunity to drive holistic improvement across all facets of care, from local council to primary care providers, to NHS trusts. Driving coordinated improvement by teams across numerous disciplines and multiple organisations, representing all elements of patient care certainly offers a unique challenge – one that Life QI provides a solution for!

Life QI is a proven solution for driving improvement at scale, and across diverse and disparate networks. The platform is widely used by NHS trusts and collaborative improvement networks alike to facilitate, track and run improvement work.

Flexibility in the platform allows for cross-organisation collaboration on projects, sharing of ideas and results, and coordination of programmes of improvement work – these could all be regarded as essential for trans ICS improvement.

Let’s dive deeper into how Life QI can support improvement in your ICS…

Bringing people together, in one space

Life QI is a collaborative online platform, enabling teams to come together to drive improvement, regardless of their role or where they work. Collaboration is consistently demonstrated to be a driving force behind success in QI.

Bringing everyone into one place ensures consistency in understanding and approach. Life QI provides a simple process to initiate or contribute to an improvement initiative, even for a QI novice. This is particularly important in an ICS where teams across multiple organisations will likely have different levels of training and capability for QI.

Using Life QI to run and track improvement work will enable teams to test, reflect and learn together accelerating improvement across an ICS.

Share ideas and success

Sharing of successful projects, changes and approaches is essential in spreading and scaling improvements. This is true in single organisations and possibly even more so in a diverse collaboration, like an ICS. Life QI provides searchable and indexable projects, providing a knowledge repository and learning opportunity across all organisations in the ICS.

Within an ICS there may be similar improvement themes of work taking place, by using the ‘Groups’ functionality it can be used to bring together these like-minded teams across organisations allowing them to share and interact more easily – whether that’s a great PDSA that’s been tested, or perhaps something you learnt along the way. Sharing of projects is augmented by group wide discussions and document sharing to further accelerate the learning process.

Screenshot of an ICS group focused on Sepsis

There are also other ways that improvement across the ICS can be tracked, for example through the use of tags. Tags are a way to categorise your projects by adding keywords, these tags can then be used when searching for projects to help you identify projects that are of a similar theme. Tags can also be used for reporting purposes, by adding specific tags to a dashboard will enable you to have an overarching view of how many projects are taking place under that category. You can read more about dashboards later in this article.

Coordinate programmes of improvement work, of any size

Anyone with prior experience of Life QI will understand that the platform centers on the “improvement project” – a discrete piece of work by a single team, working toward a defined aim. In a structure such as an ICS, it is likely that there will be multiple teams from multiple sites and organisations working towards a common aim. This is where the Programmes functionality comes in.

Programmes allows the coordination of larger pieces of work where multiple teams are coming together to solve a single issue. These teams can be formed from a singular organisation or across multiple sites.

Programmes allow for simple communication with and between teams, as well as the allowing users across all sites to easily track and review individual data as well as aggregates and outcomes for the Programme as a whole.

Screenshot of a programme general page

Keep up to date with Dashboards

Of course, with all this great QI work going on, you will need to keep up to speed with how it is progressing. Customisable dashboards in Life QI allow you to track project and programme progress at any level. Dashboards are an important mechanism in identifying where projects are demonstrating success, as well as those that may require support or where progress has stalled.

Screenshot of an ICS dashboard reporting on Pressure Sore projects

Life QI’s real-time dashboards are completely customisable, both in the datasets they report from, and the way it is displayed. Dashboards can be established to report on progress within a single organisation, across multiple organisations, across a specific theme of work or different Programmes that are running.

Dashboards provide unrivalled visibility to the improvement activity across any organisation, department, or program of work. They encourage local ownership of QI work, and facilitate easy access to the portfolio of projects.

The ideal solution

Life QI is a proven solution for driving joined up improvement in multi-organisation settings. For current customers aiming to use Life QI to collaborate across your ICS, please contact your Success Manager to learn more. If you are new to Life QI, you can contact us here or book a demo and we will be happy to show you more!