The National United States Center Data Repository: Core essential interprofessional practice & education data enabling triple aim analytics

Abstract

Understanding the impact that interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) might have on triple aim patient outcomes is of high interest to health care providers, educators, administrators, and policy makers. Before the work undertaken by the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at the University of Minnesota, no standard mechanism to acquire and report outcome data related to interprofessional education and collaborative practice and its effect on triple aim outcomes existed. This article describes the development and adoption of the National Center Data Repository (NCDR) designed to capture data related to IPECP processes and outcomes to support analyses of the relationship of IPECP on the Triple Aim. The data collection methods, web-based survey design and implementation process are discussed. The implications of this informatics work to the field of IPECP and health care quality and safety include creating standardized capacity to describe interprofessional practice and measure outcomes connecting interprofessional education and collaborative practice to the triple aim within and across sites/settings, leveraging an accessible data collection process using user friendly web-based survey design to support large data scholarship and instrument testing, and establishing standardized data elements and variables that can potentially lead to enhancements to national/international information system and academic accreditation standards to further team-based, interprofessional, collaborative research in the field.

Teaching evidence-based practice principles to prepare health professions students for an interprofessional learning experience

“…In the original article about the “Triple Aim,” the authors suggested that “physician-centric care” was a barrier to meeting these pursuits [ 5 ]. Interprofessional collaborative practice has been endorsed as an important transition in health care delivery that will further the “Triple Aim” by encouraging teamwork among health care providers [ 6 – 9 ].…”

The US National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education Measurement and Assessment Collection

“…The lack of appropriate assessments and tools to measure the effects of interprofessional education on collaborative practice, and the effects of collaborative practice on cost, quality, and patient experience outcomes, is well reported in the literature (e.g. Committee on Measuring, 2015; Pechacek et al, 2015;Reeves, 2016). There have been multiple calls to move the field forward.…”

“…Since its inception, the measurement of team function in practice and interprofessional education has risen to an even higher priority. The National Center's experience with the National Innovations Network and building the National Center Data Repository (Pechacek et al, 2015) identified an especially acute need to find good measures of "teamwork," as experienced by different kinds of groups working in various education and clinical environments. As a result, the National Center has supported the development of the Assessment of Clinical Environment (ACE-15) tool (Tilden, Eckstrom, & Dieckmann, 2015) and other instruments used in real time in the Nexus Innovations Network.…”