ACNs, process improvement and revamping the clinical librarian program

Posted by Carolyn Martin on May 25th, 2016 Posted in: News from Network Members

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This is a summary of a presentation from the recent Medical Library Association annual conference in Toronto from Andrea Ball, Care Management and Population Health Librarian at the University of Washington Health Sciences Library

The Affordable Care Act has brought many changes to healthcare. This transformation is moving at a fast pace and librarians are trying to keep up. The University of Washington has established itself as an Accountable Care Network (ACN) striving towards the Triple Aim of improved health, increased patient satisfaction and reduced costs. As such, a new clinical librarian position was created with the title of Care Management and Population Health librarian. This position supports the organization in its ACN development through searching, LibGuide and Alerts development.

To further aid the organization during this transformation of healthcare, a series of focus groups were held to help the clinical librarians determine how best to meet the clinician’s needs. Analysis of the results identified three main themes: lack of awareness of the clinical library resources and services; a need for training to be focused on the current clinical arena; and, a lack of knowledge that the librarians are experts in what they do. Now that we had the data we could apply process improvement tools. We employed Value Engineering to help us understand our key functions, the main one being ‘Empower Clinicians.’ We then used Logic Models to help us understand the way forward. In response to the focus group data, and based on our process improvement work, we chose to address these themes through increasing our engagement with various departments and committees, implementing social media tools and beginning the development of short, focused video tutorials.

It is our hope that these enhanced clinical librarian services will serve our diverse patron population well – both through increased visibility and more clinically-relevant resources. Furthermore, we anticipate these changes will support our clinicians and the organization as it works towards the Triple Aim in healthcare transformation.