Quality Innovations Program Award

Introduction

The Mayo Clinic Rochester Education and Research Committees, in conjunction with Mayo Clinic's Center for Translational Science Activities, are partnering in an exciting new venture that leverages our respective strengths to develop a new approach to defining, implementing, and teaching "quality healthcare." The national discussion surrounding this issue has focused on a handful of markers designed to measure one institution's performance against another's. However, these markers fail to measure important factors, such as patient satisfaction, and there is no empirical evidence that they represent the best predictors of improved patient outcomes. In keeping with Mayo's commitment to provide leadership for a new national healthcare discussion, we will use our vast research and educational resources to define "quality" in healthcare and to evaluate optimal methods and systems for the delivery of quality care. The goal is to develop an evidence-based, scientifically-proven model of care that measurably enhances value (i.e., improves patient outcomes and satisfaction, while maintaining or reducing costs) and to draw upon our unparalleled educational resources to teach current and future practitioners to implement this model of care in their practices.

Purpose

This program, in its first cycle of funding and supported from Incented Investment in Mayo's Future (IIMF), is a competitive intramural granting mechanism that seeks to improve the care of our patients by promoting research into healthcare quality, including research into quality definition, quality domains and research designs, in order to improve patient outcomes, while maintaining or reducing costs. The issue of interest to this RFA is the development and evaluation of novel, clinically and biologically meaningful measures of quality of care. Areas of focus for this program include:

• Developing more biologically and clinically meaningful measures of quality care
• Testing the validity of novel quality metrics in relation to important patient outcomes
• Quantifying their responsiveness to quality improvement activities
• Demonstrating the feasibility of the ascertainment of such measures
• Evaluating the ability of the new metrics to discriminate among clinical units offering different care quality

This program will not support specific quality improvement projects.

Eligibility

• All Consultants and Senior Associate Consultants at Mayo Clinic Rochester, including the Mayo Health System
• Investigators may not hold more than one concurrent award
• Applications will be accepted from individual investigators or groups of investigators
• Protocol funding cannot exceed $35,000 in direct costs per year for up to 2 years, with second year funding contingent upon satisfactory progress (Eligible costs include personnel, supplies, services, and infrastructure as appropriate)
• Up to 20% category 1 time may be available if necessary and adequately justified