Achieving Quality Through Evidence-Based Practice and Process Improvement Synergy: The EQUiPP Framework

Quality improvement is a well-known and commonly utilized approach to improving care and outcomes that is built on process improvement methods but not practice improvement methods. Because quality care includes both process and practice elements, process improvement alone cannot ensure quality outcomes will be achieved. This calls for a new approach.

To share an innovative, synergistic, and collaborative quality framework: Evidence-based Quality in Practice and Process: The EQUiPP Framework.

The EQUiPP Framework's intent is to provide structure for collaborative efforts to effectively identify best practices/processes, implement and sustain change, and improve outcomes. The framework provides guidance to decrease the frequency of implementing ineffective changes by deriving effective solutions … the first time, every time.

A team of experts used a consensus approach to develop the framework.

A precursor to this framework, the Practice and Process Improvement = Quality (PPQ) Model, was evaluated by individual expert review and a two-day beta test workshop. Feedback was obtained during the workshop when participants applied the model in activities reflecting real-world healthcare scenarios. When used in both DNP student work and real-world health systems, fundamental flaws were identified which resulted in the necessity to develop a different conceptualization. The framework described here is a new approach to improving quality care.

The EQUiPP Framework is a tool that provides the synergistic integration of both practice improvement (EBP) and process improvement methodologies to successfully implement and sustain best practices to achieve and sustain quality outcomes.

The EQUiPP Framework aligns EBP and process improvement, allowing clinicians and students to work collaboratively to identify and effectively, as well as efficiently, implement and sustain best practices to deliver quality outcomes.