Clinical leaders for Obstetrics (OB) were deeply committed to delivering equitable care for all patients, but they had no practical way to monitor or evaluate equity across their complex care delivery systems. Members of this OB team were troubled by nationally-published research suggesting racial disparities in postpartum pain management, and they wanted to ensure that such disparities didn't affect their own patients. But, without practical visibility into their own real-world data, how could they assess their performance? And, if they found inequities, how could they quickly identify, implement, and manage potential solutions?
In just minutes, the OB team used AdaptX to diagnose critical disparities in pain scores based on race: members of some racial groups reported higher post-operative pain scores. And, these patients were significantly more likely to experience severe pain.
Armed with these insights, the OB team reexamined their pain management protocols, and they discovered protocol gaps causing variability in the frequency of pain rating assessments and delivery of pain management options. To address these issues, the team developed new pain management scripts: clinicians delivered improved patient education, refined shared vocabulary for rating pain, clarified standing order sets, and standardized pain assessment and treatment protocols.
Each week, the OB team used AdaptX to assess the performance of their team's interventions, to ask critical new questions, and to adapt their approaches. Because AdaptX is self-serve for clinicians, they could evaluate new ideas on-the-fly, dramatically accelerating their management cycles. This immediate feedback drove broad engagement across OB physicians, nurses, and Anesthesia physicians. As a result, the OB team was empowered to rapidly deliver and iterate series of continuously-improving interventions, developing a management process in which they worked on each identified pain disparity until they achieved sustained improvement.