Improvement Initiatives & Impact

In an effort to reduce unplanned visits to the hospital and emergency department among those diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the IBD Qorus collaborative has designed an Urgent Care Best Practices Toolkit. The Toolkit provides guidance on how to implement specific interventions that demonstrated significant improvement across multiple meaningful outcome measures, including a reduction in the need for urgent care, hospitalization, opioids, and steroids among IBD patients. Learn more about our findings and access the Toolkit here.

The IBD Qorus initiative is trying to address two challenges in IBD care– one, to identify reasons for significant variation in the quality of IBD care and two, to define metrics for high-quality care for patients and providers. These two areas are important to address as practice variation and misalignment around expectations of care impact healthcare costs, service utilization, patient outcomes and patient experience. 

As the IBD Qorus program aims to tackle these two challenges, the IBD Qorus Value Compass was created to assess progress towards these aims. The IBD Qorus Value Compass is a set of measures that fall within four domains – patient experience, clinical status, functional status, healthcare costs and utilization – and that reflect a broad view of value across the spectrum of healthcare stakeholders.  

The framework of the IBD Qorus Value Compass includes a balanced and parsimonious set of measures that assess what matters most to patients and providers and serves as a “blueprint” for high-quality care allowing healthcare providers to evaluate their patients and care delivery from every angle. As such, the Value Compass is the North Star of IBD Qorus.

In September 2020, the IBD Qorus collaborative embarked on a new improvement initiative called Treat to Target (TTT), a treatment strategy that aligns a remission-based therapeutic goal with the patient’s personal goals regarding quality of life. TTT is designed to encourage the physician to monitor the patient more frequently in order to assess progress towards these pre-determined goals and adjust treatment accordingly. While used in other chronic diseases, this would be the first time a TTT strategy has been explored in a real-world setting like IBD Qorus.

IBD Qorus providers and researchers have developed care pathways that aim to provide a consistent and standardized approach to addressing common and unmet needs of IBD patients. The first care pathways developed were for IBD-associated anemia and malnutrition, based on gap analyses that identified a significant need for these care pathways from both patient and provider focus groups. The pathways follow a specific, replicable structure with 4 components: screening, assessment, intervention, and follow-up.

Based on the Qorus experience, the anemia and nutrition care pathways have brought greater awareness and adherence to standardized clinical management for these common IBD related issues.

The below resources highlight the care pathways and how to implement them in your practice. 

IBD Anemia Care Pathway

IBD Nutrition Care Pathway