Kristin J. Leuschner

Using Quality Improvement Methods To Improve Public Health Emergency Preparedness: PREPARE For Pandemic Influenza

Many public health departments seek to improve their capability to respond to large-scale events such as an influenza pandemic. Quality improvement (QI), a structured approach to improving performance, has not been widely applied in public health. We developed and tested a pilot QI collaborative to explore whether QI could help public health departments improve their pandemic preparedness. We demonstrated that this is a promising model for improving public health preparedness and may be useful for improving public health performance overall. Further efforts are needed, however, to encourage the robust implementation of QI in public health.

Developing national standards for public health emergency preparedness with a limited evidence base.

OBJECTIVE The paucity of evidence and wide variation among communities creates challenges for developing congressionally mandated national performance standards for public health preparedness. Using countermeasure dispensing as an example, we present an approach for developing standards that balances national uniformity and local flexibility, consistent with the quality of evidence available. METHODS We used multiple methods, including a survey of community practices, mathematical modeling, and expert panel discussion. RESULTS The article presents recommended dispensing standards, along with a general framework that can be used to analyze tradeoffs involved in developing other preparedness standards. CONCLUSIONS Standards can be developed using existing evidence, but would be helped immensely by a stronger evidence base.

Developing and Testing the Health Care Safety Hotline: A Prototype Consumer Reporting System for Patient Safety Events

This article describes the design, development, and testing of the Health Care Safety Hotline, a prototype consumer reporting system for patient safety events. The prototype was designed and developed with ongoing review by a technical expert panel and feedback obtained during a public comment period. Two health care delivery organizations in one metropolitan area collaborated with the researchers to demonstrate and evaluate the system. The prototype was deployed and elicited information from patients, family members, and caregivers through a website or an 800 phone number. The reports were considered useful and had little overlap with information received by the health care organizations through their usual risk management, customer service, and patient safety monitoring systems. However, the frequency of reporting was lower than anticipated, suggesting that further refinements, including efforts to raise awareness by actively soliciting reports from subjects, might be necessary to substantially increase the volume of useful reports. It is possible that a single technology platform could be built to meet a variety of different patient safety objectives, but it may not be possible to achieve several objectives simultaneously through a single consumer reporting system while also establishing trust with patients, caregivers, and providers.

Can Technology Make Schools Safer

A project of the RAND Corporation, the Police Executive Research Forum, RTI International, and the University of Denver Th is brief describes work done in RAND Justice, Infrastructure, and Environment and documented in e Role of Technology in Improving K–12 School Safety, by Heather L. Schwartz, Rajeev Ramchand, Dionne Barnes-Proby, Sean Grant, Brian A. Jackson, Kristin J. Leuschner, Mauri Matsuda, and Jessica Saunders, RR-1488-NIJ (available at www.rand.org/t/RR1488), 2016. To view this brief online, visit www.rand.org/t/RB9922. Th e RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofi t, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s publications do not necessarily refl ect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. R® is a registered trademark.

Learning from Experience

This chapter includes a description of research that took place into studying past data. The hope is that we would learn something that would benefit future users of GPS. In addition, some recommendations are given as to how one might mitigate the risks associated with GPS positioning, and accurate GPS positioning. Another topic that is included concerns surveying. Land surveying is an established discipline in which the accurate location of features and marked positions are measured. Surveyors have used GPS for some time and it is advantageous for the reader to study the approaches they adopt so as to circumvent problems.