MAGIC QI : Management of Atrial Fibrillation in General Practice and Integrated Care Quality Improvement

Sarah Mcerlean

Keywords: Atrial Fibrillation, Chronic Disease, Quality, Audit, Primary Care

Background:

Worldwide, atrial fibrillation ( AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia in adults and poses a significant burden to patients, physicians and healthcare systems. We know that adherence to guideline-directed therapy can improve outcomes in AF and yet there are wide variations in compliance to these guidelines.

Guidelines are rarely absorbed organically into clinical practice sufficiently enough to create a meaningful change. Additional QI interventions are often needed. We have collaborated with MedVault - an IT company, to create an electronic audit tool. This audit tool will provide a summary of care in the form of a colour-coded excel spreadsheet.

Creating an audit summary and highlighting performance metrics in an understandable way will eliminate the need for tedious, time-consuming analysis for busy practising GPs.

Research questions:

The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of using an electronic audit tool for audit and quality improvement in general practice.

The objectives are to:
1. Audit AF care and provide feedback to participating practices.
2. Interview participating GPs to establish the feasibility of using the dashboard.
3. Compile an aggregate report which can be used to benchmark care in Irish general practice to international guidelines.

Method:

1.Information evening for GPs
2.Informed consent
3. Participating GPs can run the audit tool in their practices
4. The audit tool will provide patient-level data to individual GP practices.
5. GPs to use highlighted information to improve patient care.
6. Undertake re-audit
7. The research team will be provided with de-identified aggregate data report.
8. The GPs will then be contacted for a short usability survey in summer 2024

Results:

This project is in the recruitment stage and so no results are available at this time.

Conclusions:

We hope to conclude that this tool is feasible and could be used in other chronic diseases.

Points for discussion:

Use of electronic tools to manage data and data interpration

Management of chronic disease

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