Stavros Niarchos Foundation Grant for Participation in Quality Programs at Rural or Urban Practices

ASCO has received new grant funding worth more than $600,000 from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for 10 practices to participate in ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) and Quality Training Program (QTP) offerings for a three-year period. The grant, “Improving the Delivery of Cancer Care in Medically Underserved Communities,” aims to improve the ability of practices in medically underserved communities to engage in quality improvement. To achieve this goal, each participating practice will engage in an individualized, structured quality improvement program.

The program will include each practice’s participation in abstracting chart data in QOPI®, following training sessions on the process.

Next, each practice will participate in ASCO’s six-month QTP course, which is comprised of three in-person sessions that include seminars, case examples, and small-group exercises, as well as on-site work at the practice and virtual meetings with ASCO staff and improvement coaches.

Finally, each practice will host a QTP one-day workshop to help incorporate the principles of quality improvement in their respective institutions.

During the program, ASCO will help practices to

• Assess their quality of care, specific quality improvement goals, and challenges/barriers to providing high quality care
• Implement a quality program based on the findings of the assessment
• Evaluate the intervention’s impact on participants’ ability to achieve individual quality improvement goals, participants’ satisfaction with the intervention, and program outcomes.

QOPI^®

QOPI® is ASCO’s quality assessment program that has helped more than 1,000 practices to date conduct self-examinations and identify specific areas for quality improvement. Participating practices can report on more than 170 evidence-based quality measures through the easy-to-use collection tool and receive individual performance scores by practice, site, and provider, as well as benchmarked scores aggregated from all participating practices. The data and results then can be used to inform future quality improvement projects and initiatives.

QTP

The QTP six-month course brings cancer care teams together to select, design, and implement a quality improvement project at their respective practices, and they work with support and guidance from experienced improvement coaches. Browse through a library of past projects from participants who have completed the program.

The QTP one-day workshops introduce participants to tools and frameworks that are used in quality improvement and teach attendees to effectively lead or participate in improvement activities. The goal is to give oncology providers skills and a sense of empowerment to tackle quality improvement projects that will help reduce clinical variation and improve patient outcomes.