NURS-FPX6011_Assessment_2 Traumatic Brain Injury Care Report

Create a patient-centered care report applying the outcomes of the Population Health Improvement Initiative (PHII). Your report will be based on the scenario presented in the Evidence-Based Health Evaluation and Application media piece.

Master’s-level nurses need to be able to think critically about the evidence, outcomes data, and other relevant information they encounter throughout their daily practice. Often the evidence or information that a nurse encounters, researches, or studies is not presented in the exact context of that nurse’s practice. A key skill of the master’s-level nurse is to be able to transfer evidence from the context in which it was presented and apply it to a different context in order to maximize the benefit to patients in that new context.

Scenario

For this assessment, you will base your report on the scenario presented in the Evidence-Based Health Evaluation and Application media piece. Some of the writing you completed and exported from the media piece can constitute your prewriting and inform the development of your final submission. Further, even though the media piece was framed within one type of care setting, you can extrapolate the situation into another care setting that is more relevant to you. You will still be able to apply community outcomes data to an individual patient or case.

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Instructions

For this assessment, you will apply the outcomes of the Population Health Improvement Initiative (PHII) to a patient-centered care report. The bullet points below correspond to grading criteria in the scoring guide. Be sure that your report addresses all of the bullets below, at minimum. You may also want to read the Patient-Centered Care Report Scoring Guide and Guiding Questions: Patient-Centered Care Report [DOCX] to better understand how each criterion will be assessed:

Evaluate the outcomes of a population health improvement initiative.
Propose strategies for improving the outcomes of the population health improvement plan, or ensuring that all outcomes are being addressed, based on the best available evidence.
Develop an individualized personal care approach that incorporates lessons learned from a population health improvement initiative.
Justify the value and relevance of evidence used as the basis for your personal care approach to your patient.
Propose a framework that could be used to evaluate desired outcomes of your approach to personalizing care for your patients and areas that could be applied to similar situations and patients in the future.
Write content clearly and logically, with correct use of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Integrate relevant sources to support assertions, correctly formatting citations and references using APA style.

Example assessment: You may use the Patient-Centered Care Report Example [DOCX] to give you an idea of what a Proficient or higher rating on the scoring guide would look like.

APA Resources: You may use the APA Style Paper Tutorial [DOCX] and the APA Style Paper Template [DOCX] to ensure your assessment is formatted in appropriate APA style.

Submission Requirements

Length of submission: 4–6 double-spaced, typed pages. Your report should be succinct yet substantive.
Number of references: Cite a minimum of 3–5 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that support your evaluation, recommendations, and plans.
APA formatting: Resources and citations are formatted according to APA style.

Competencies Measured

By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the course competencies through the following assessment scoring guide criteria:

Competency 1: Apply evidence-based practice to plan patient-centered care.

- Develop an individualized personal care approach that incorporates lessons learned from a population health improvement initiative.
Competency 2: Apply evidence-based practice to design interventions to improve population health.

- Propose strategies for improving the outcomes of a population health improvement plan, or ensuring that all outcomes are being addressed, based on the best available evidence.
Competency 3: Evaluate outcomes of evidence-based interventions.

- Evaluate the outcomes of a population health improvement initiative.
- Propose a framework that could be used to evaluate desired outcomes of an approach to personalizing care for patients and areas that could be applied to similar situations and patients in the future.
Competency 4: Evaluate the value and relative weight of available evidence upon which to make a clinical decision.

- Justify the value and relevance of evidence used as the basis for a personal care approach to a patient.
Competency 5: Synthesize evidence-based practice and academic research to communicate effective solutions.

- Write content clearly and logically, with correct use of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
- Integrate relevant sources to support assertions, correctly formatting citations and references using APA style

EVIDENCE–BASED HEALTH EVALUATION AND APPLICATION

Introduction

Public health improvement initiatives (PHII) provide invaluable data for patient–centered care, but their research is often conducted in a context different from the needs of any individual patient. Providers must make a conscious effort to apply their findings to specific patients’ care.

In this activity, you will learn about a PHII, and explore its application to a particular patient’s care plan.

Janie Poole

Charge Nurse

Overview

You continue in your role as a nurse at the Uptown Wellness Clinic. You receive an email from the charge nurse, Janie Poole. Click the button to read it:

From: Janie Poole6/7/2022

To:

Good morning!

At last week’s conference I spoke with Alicia Balewa, Director of Safe Headspace. They’re a relatively new nonprofit working on improving outcomes for TBI patients, and I immediately thought of Mr. Nowak. At his last biannual cholesterol screening he mentioned having trouble with his balance. This may be related to his hypertension, but he believes it’s related to the time he was hospitalized many years ago after falling out of a tree, and expressed distress that this might be the beginning of a rapid decline.

Ms. Balewa will be on premises next week, and I’d like to set aside some time for you to talk.

— Janie

Alicia Balewa

Director of Safe Headspace

Overview

Interview Alicia Balewa to find out more about a public health improvement initiative that might apply to Mr. Nowak’s care.

Interview:

I have a patient who might benefit from some of the interventions for TBI and PTSD you recently studied. What populations did your public health improvement initiative study?

My father came home from Vietnam with a kaleidoscope of mental health problems. That was the 1970s, when treatment options for things like PTSD, TBI, and even depression were very different. Since then there has been a lot of investment in treatment and recovery for combat veterans. That’s excellent news for veterans in treatment now, but they’re not looking at my dad, and how his TBI and PTSD have affected him through mid–life and now as a senior. That’s why I started Safe Headspace: to focus on older patients who are years or decades past their trauma, and find ways to help them.

Which treatments showed the strongest improvement?

Exercise. We were able to persuade about half of our participants — that’s around 400 people, mostly men ages 45–80 — to follow the CDC’s recommendations for moderate aerobic exercise. Almost everyone showed improvement in mood, memory, and muscle control after four weeks. After that a lot of participants dropped out, which is disappointing. But of the 75 who stuck with it for another three months, muscle control improved 15%, mood improved 22%, and short–to–medium term memory improved 61%. We didn’t specify what kind of exercise, but we did ask them to record what they did every week, so that data is available.

Second was medication and therapy. Most of our participants didn’t receive any kind of psychotherapy in the years immediately following their trauma, so we had everyone assessed by a team of psychotherapists. As a result of those assessments, 40% of participants started on anti–depressant medication and 9% started taking anti–psychotics. Those who started taking medications now have regular contact with a therapist to manage that care. With some help at home to stick to the regimen, all but a few have successfully followed their treatment plans. They’ve reported a 26% improvement in mood over six months, and a 6% improvement in memory.

The third treatment I want to mention is meditation. We only had a small group interested in trying it, but the results were dramatic. We prescribed daily meditation at home, just 10 to 15 minutes, with a weekly hour–long guided group meditation for all 23 participants. After three weeks we lost two to disinterest, but the other 21 showed improvements of over 70% in mood and memory, and 32% in muscle control.

Have you tried anything that hasn’t worked?

Sure. There are memory exercises for patients in elderly care, and things like Sudoku and crossword puzzles. We didn’t see any gains with those. Some of our participants preferred strength training to aerobic exercise, and the only improvement we saw in that group was in muscle control, but only 4%, which is significantly less than the aerobic group.

I should also say that we were working with a willing group of participants. They knew they needed help, and were motivated to get it. One of the hurdles we see with veterans, especially in older generations, is an unwillingness to acknowledge that they have a problem. We haven’t had to wrestle with that because everyone who volunteers to participate wants to be there.

Your organization is intervening with people who have TBI and PTSD simultaneously. We have a patient with moderate TBI suffered almost 40 years ago, but no history of PTSD. Have you separated your population and studied each separately?

We haven’t, no. In some cases we could, for those who come in with previous diagnoses and medical records. But we have participants who either weren’t diagnosed, were under–diagnosed at the time, or don’t have records to show us.

Now that you’ve talked to Alicia, answering the questions below may help you apply the data from the PHII to your patient’s case.

What were the outcomes of the PHII?

As you’ve seen, a PHII can apply to a patient under your care. But it’s not always a perfect fit, and it’s important to think carefully about how your patient’s condition, symptoms, background, and experience compare to that of participants in a PHII.

Now that you’ve talked to Alicia, answering the questions below may help you apply the data from the PHII to your patient’s case.

How could they have been improved?

The outcomes of the PHII could have been improved by finding participants who actively wanted to participate in the initiative that would have provided more accurate results.

How do the results of the PHII relate to Mr. Nowak’s case?

The results of the PHII relate to Mr. Nowak’s case as these are targeted interventions to similar patient populations that have shown significant improvements in symptomatic management, such as mood, memory, and muscle control.

Patient-Centered Care Report

Learner’s Name

School of Nursing and Health Sciences, Capella University

NURS-FPX6011: Evidence-Based Practice for Patient-Centered Care and Population Health

Faculty

Date, Year

Patient-Centered Care Report

Health care organizations in the United States are realizing the importance of health improvement initiatives aimed at large population groups. Population health improvement initiatives (PHIIs) were introduced to reduce health care costs in general and improve the health of people in different population groups such as pregnant women or the elderly. Additionally, PHIIs provide vital data on patient-centered care and per capita cost in the form of measurable clinical, humanistic, procedural, economic, and utilization outcomes (Huber, 2017). Health care professionals consider a PHII’s outcomes as evidence for care plans that meet the individual needs of patients treated by a health organization.

Often, the evidence that a health care professional encounters is not presented in the exact context of that professional’s practice because of differences in the patient population, illnesses, or care environment. In such situations, health care professionals analyze a PHII’s evidence and select only those variables that apply to the context of the specific patient care plan. The process of transferring evidence into practice from one context to another is discussed using the example of Uptown Wellness Clinic’s (UWC) patient Mr. Nowak, who suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) after a fall. At his cholesterol screening, Mr. Nowak complained that he has been losing his balance lately. According to him, the balance problems are symptomatic of the brain injury. A charge nurse at UWC recommended that Mr. Nowak’s patient care plan be based on evidence gathered from Safe Headspace, a nonprofit PHII that works to improve outcomes for people with TBI and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Capella University, n.d.). Once the PHII’s outcomes are evaluated, the evidence will be transferred into Mr. Nowak’s treatment context.

The objective of the evaluation is to reveal knowledge gaps in the PHII, devise strategies to bridge the gaps, and incorporate the new strategies into Mr. Nowak’s patient care plan. The evidence will help create a new assessment framework for the patient care plan as well.

Evaluation of a Population Health Improvement Initiative’s Outcomes

Since its formation, Safe Headspace PHII significantly improved health outcomes in older patients suffering from PTSD because of head trauma. The PHII uses various interventions to treat mental health problems, such as exercise, therapy, and meditation. Regular exercise was the initiative’s most successful intervention. Of the 400 participants in the intervention, mostly men in the 45–80 age bracket, 75 participants followed aerobic exercise routines for four months. 15% of the men showed improved muscle control, 22% showed improved mood, and 61% showed improved short- to medium-term memory (Capella University, n.d.).

Those who volunteered for medication and therapy were assessed by a team of psychotherapists and provided therapy support—40% of the participants started on antidepressants and 9% started taking antipsychotics. Within six months, 26% of the participants showed improvement in their mood and 6% showed improvement in memory. The third intervention, meditation, had only 23 participants but showed positive outcomes. In three weeks, 21 participants—two dropped out—showed over 70% improvement in mood and memory and 32% improvement in muscle control. Strength training and puzzle solving to improve memory were unsuccessful interventions because the interventions did not give any significant gains (Capella University, n.d.).

However, these statistics do not give a complete picture. To begin with, the PHII intervened with people who were diagnosed with both PTSD and TBI. The impact of interventions on patients with either PTSD or TBI was not studied separately. Therefore, the outcomes of cases like Mr. Nowak’s, who has TBI and no history of PTSD, are unknown and need further evaluation. Moreover, Safe Headspace’s outcomes do not explain why patients were demotivated from following self-management plans and whether the lack of motivation relates to factors such as high medical costs or unsatisfactory care. Evaluating these unexplored outcomes expands the evidence base and helps health care professionals in deciding interventions that will be appropriate for a patient’s symptoms, background, and experiences.

Strategies to Improve Outcomes of a Population Health Improvement Plan

The launch of the Triple Aim by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in 2007 was a landmark development toward quality improvement in health care in the United States. The Triple Aim is a broad framework of linked goals designed to optimize health system performance: (a) improving the patient’s experience of care, (b) improving the health of populations, and (c) reducing per capita cost of health care (American Hospital Association, 2015). The framework has influenced national initiatives such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The Triple Aim goals have five preconditions for high-quality care: (a) focus on individuals and families, (b) redesign of primary care services and structures, (c) population health management, (d) cost control platform, and (e) system integration and execution (Institute for Healthcare Improvement, n.d). The evaluation of Safe Headspace’s data reveals the poorly integrated Triple Aim goals. As UWC’s patient care plan is based on evidence collected from Safe Headspace’s PHII outcomes, the new care setting may inherit the poor outcomes. Incorporating the Triple Aim prevents the transfer of faulty evidence into UWC’s patient care plan by setting achievable goals and improving the quality of care delivery at the clinic.

By bridging the gaps in Safe Headspace’s programs, the PHII’s methods can be applied to UWC’s care plan for patients like Mr. Nowak. Bellin Health, an integrated health delivery system in Wisconsin, illustrates the effectiveness of the Triple Aim. Using the framework, Bellin improved the health of its enrolled employee and Medicare populations. The three Triple Aim goals reflected in the way Bellin’s health care professionals imparted cost-effective, patient satisfactory, and holistic care for large-scale health programs and individual cases (Whittington, Nolan, Lewis, & Torres, 2015).

Despite its successes, the Triple Aim is facing many challenges. According to the American Healthcare Organization (2016), diverse health markets and a lack of shared vision make moving all health care systems to one approach challenging and impractical. A second challenge is the Triple Aim’s phantom limb, which refers to the well-being of health care professionals. According to a study, the three goals ignore the needs of caregivers, creating a stressful workplace that carries a high-risk of staff burnout (Spinelli, 2013). Therefore, quality improvement should include steps to improve the workplace for health care professionals.

It is important to consider the benefits and limitations of any quality improvement effort. Health care professionals at UWC should identify the advantages and disadvantages of using the Triple Aim for Mr. Nowak’s care plan. Likewise, the plan should incorporate lessons learned from the PHII outcomes and introduce changes to address inadequacies.

Approaches to an Individualized Personal Care Plan

UWC has two objectives behind developing an evidence-based patient care plan from Safe Headspace’s outcomes. The short-term objective is to diagnose and treat Mr. Nowak’s health problems. The long-term objective is to use Mr. Nowak’s care plan as the foundation for similar cases in the future. To achieve these objectives, UWC must change its organization and delivery systems. The need to change UWC’s health system is based on certain assumptions developed from the PHII evaluation: (a) the new delivery design should achieve the Triple Aim goals, (b) primary care providers should be competent in evidence-based practice (EBP), and (c) patients should receive self-management support and cost-effective care.

A current and innovative approach that satisfies the first assumption is the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). The PCMH can implement the Triple Aim goals by adopting new technologies and care delivery methods and establishing caring relationships with patients and families. The PCMH improves the delivery of primary care by making primary care comprehensive, patient-centered, coordinated, accessible, and committed to quality and patient safety (Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, n.d.). These functions help understand the health, economic, and cultural needs of specific patients.

The process of implementing the PCMH includes training and evaluating health care professionals, especially primary care providers. Training and evaluation are important to integrating EBP into care delivery to improve outcomes. Among the methods that facilitate EBP, self-management is very successful. One self-management practice is mobile health (mHealth), which is the use of mobile technologies to “inform, assess, anticipate, and aid in interventions while monitoring and coordinating patient health status and care” (Lahue, Hughes, Hills, Li, & Hiatt, 2015, para. 1). Mobile health is cost-effective because it reduces the number of clinical visits and circumvents the limited availability of care providers and resources (Nundy, 2012).

Once applied to UWC’s patient care plan, the PCMH, EBP, and mHealth can guide Mr. Nowak’s care in the hospital and in his home. The three approaches can improve Mr. Nowak’s awareness of his condition, motivate him to start self-management methods, and make health care more accessible to him. In addition, the approaches will help UWC achieve its second objective regarding the patient care plan. The value and relevance of the approaches can be justified by evaluating current research on their application.

Value and Relevance of Evidence Used in Patient Care Plan

Many studies advocate incorporating the PCMH, EBP, and self-management practices in population health improvement efforts. Evidence-based practice is a fundamental guideline (Huber, 2017) for all levels, initiatives, and sectors in health care, not just population health improvement. Therefore, justifying the value of EBP is unnecessary. The PCMH and mHealth, however, are relatively new approaches and require evaluations of their evidence-base.

The PCMH was very successful at improving the relationship between primary care teams, patients, and families. One three-year study described the successful integration of the PCHM in the Pennsylvania Chronic Care Initiative. Adjusted costs observed in the PCMH pilot year were 17.5% lower than data from non-PCMH practices. As a result, rates of hospitalization, emergency department visits, and ambulatory visits reduced (Nielsen, Buelt, Patel, & Nichols, 2016). Similar results were seen in the Texas Children’s Health Plan and Hudson Valley initiative.

The second approach, mHealth, has great potential in areas with high clinical and cost burdens, such as urban areas. One such setting was the University of Chicago Medicine (UCM), an academic medical center serving predominantly urban, working-class African American communities. The mHealth initiative included texting services for self-management support, sending e-mail and text alerts about appointments, follow-up contact through phone calls, e-mails, and texts. These steps greatly enhanced care management processes and motivated patients to practice self-management methods regularly (Nundy et al., 2012).

However, these approaches have limitations. To begin with, the PCMH is mostly used in chronic disease management (Nielsen, Buelt, Patel, & Nichols, 2016) and there is a dearth of information on its use in managing mental health problems. In the context of mHealth, Nundy et al. (2012) observed that patients using the platform needed a human face to be involved in the program. Hence, the UCM assigned staff members to monitor mHealth participants. Furthermore, there are uncertainties about the implementation of mHealth because of the complex and highly regulated nature of technology and health markets.

The studies conducted on the PCMH and mHealth enhance UWC’s efforts in population health improvement. The evidence gathered from these studies will help the clinic take steps to improve the quality of these approaches. One of the ways to do that is to choose a sustainable evaluative framework to ensure that all patient care plan parameters are met.

Framework for Evaluation of Patient Care Plan Outcomes

A critical component of evidence-based practice is evaluation, without which improvements are difficult to achieve. Measurable data identify both effective and ineffective components of a health care initiative. Additionally, PHII evaluations help secure government funding, a necessity for organizations with enrolled Medicaid and Medicare populations.

The evaluative framework has certain prerequisites: Progress is tracked using the Triple Aim, and the framework is evaluated against the entire health system. The latter prerequisite is essential because allocating funds and resources for population health improvement needs the whole organization to make adjustments in primary, secondary, tertiary, and ancillary care systems. One Triple-Aim-aligned framework that UWC can implement is New Zealand’s County Manukau Health’s (CMH) System Level Measures (SLMs), which were adapted from the IHI’s Whole System Measures (Doolan-Noble, Lyndon, Hau, Hill, Gray, & Gauld, 2015).

The SLMs complement each other and represent measures across the continuum of care. Therefore, UWC can monitor how a change in one SLM increases or decreases other measures. The SLMs adapted by CMH are as follows: a) provide for patients with health care needs, (b) improving the process of providing services—access and end-of-life, (c) ensuring effectiveness, (d) reporting clinical outcomes, (e) reporting functional and efficiency outcomes, and (f) ensuring patient satisfaction. The measures are further comprised of process and outcome indicators. For example, some clinical outcome indicators are hospital standardized mortality ratios and adverse event rates (Doolan-Noble et al., 2015). As these indicators are specific to the population context, UWC needs to add or remove indicators accordingly.

While implemented successfully at the CMH, the SLMs have certain limitations. To begin with, a whole system evaluation presents a methodological challenge because of population variations and lack of standardization in coding and definitions of indicators. Furthermore, the SLM can present operational challenges at UWC—the clinic may not have the technical capability to capture, analyze, and publish SLM-related data. The solution is to create a team of data analysts for data collection and analyze data over a long period of time (Doolan-Noble et al., 2015).

The limitations, by themselves, are not challenging as there are specific strategies available that can address these problems. Nor do they dilute the importance of the measures. An evaluation is the only way UWC can gather robust information about the quality and safety of its initiative and realize the Triple Aim.

Conclusion

The implementation process of a population health improvement plan is complex and comprises many steps and strategies. In fact, errors can still arise despite using evidence-based methods and frameworks. In spite of the difficulties associated with implementing a PHII, it helps health care professionals create a comprehensive care plan for patients, such as Mr. Nowak, who exhibit physiological and mental health problems. The approaches help health care professionals adapt to changing care settings in the long term. Understanding the continuum of care from creation to evaluation is the first step to innovating existing health structures and achieving the Triple Aim.

References

American Hospital Association. (2015, April). Zeroing in on the Triple Aim (Issue brief). http://aha.org/content/15/brief-3aim.pdf

American Hospital Association, Committee on Research and Committee on Performance Improvement. (2016, January). Care and payment models to achieve the Triple Aim. American Hospital Association. http://aha.org/content/16/care-payment-models-achieve-triple-aim-report-2016.pdf

Capella University. (n.d.). Evidence-based health evaluation and application [Transcript]. http://media.capella.edu/CourseMedia/MSN6011/evidenceBasedHealthEvaluation/media.asp?

Doolan-Noble, F., Lyndon, M., Hau, S., Hill, A., Gray, J., & Gauld, R. (2015). How well does your healthcare system perform? Tracking progress toward the Triple Aim using system level measures. The New Zealand Medical Journal, 128(1415), 44–50. http://search.proquest.com.library.capella.edu/docview/1686373805/fulltextPDF/2505807F00D0482BPQ/1?accountid=27965

Huber, D. L. (2017). Leadership and nursing care management (6th ed.). W. B. Saunders. http://dx.doi.org/10.7748/nm.21.6.13.s14

Institute for Healthcare Improvement. (n.d.). The IHI Triple Aim. http://ihi.org/Engage/Initiatives/TripleAim/Pages/default.aspx

Lahue, B. J., Hughes, K. E., Hills, B. J., Li, S. S., & Hiatt, J. C. (2015, July). Can mHealth revolutionize evidence-based practice in diabetes care? [Special section]. The American Journal of Managed Care, 21(11). https://ajmc.s3.amazonaws.com/_media/_pdf/EBDM_7’15_full-lowrez.pdf

Nielsen, M., Buelt, L., Patel, K, & Nichols, L. M. (2016). The patient-centered medical home’s impact on cost and quality: Annual review of evidence, 2014-2015. https://pcpcc.org/sites/default/files/resources/The%20Patient-Centered%20Medical%20Home%27s%20Impact%20on%20Cost%20and%20Quality%2C%20Annual%20Review%20of%20Evidence%2C%202014-2015.pdf

Nundy, S., Dick, J. J., Goddu, A. P., Hogan, P., Lu, C. E., Solomon, M. C., . . . Peek, M. E. (2012). Using mobile health to support the chronic care model: Developing an institutional initiative. International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications, 2012. https://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/871925

Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative. (n.d.). Defining the medical home: A patient-centered philosophy that drives primary care excellence. https://pcpcc.org/about/medical-home

Spinelli, W. M. (2013). The phantom limb of the Triple Aim. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 88(12), 1356–1357. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.08.017

Whittington, J. W., Nolan, K., Lewis, N., & Torres, T. (2015). Pursuing the Triple Aim: The first 7 years. The Milbank Quarterly, 93(2), 263–300. http://mydocvault.us/uploads/7/5/8/6/7586208/pursuing_the_triple_aim-the_first_7_years.pdf

Guiding Questions