International Training & Education Center for Health (I-TECH) recently partnered on the first randomized trial of educational outreach and continuous quality improvement (CQI) in Africa. The evidence in a new IDCAP Overview article published in PLOS ONE — “Improving Facility Performance in Infectious Disease Care in Uganda: a Mixed Design Study with Pre/Post and Cluster Randomized TrialComponents” — by Dr. Marcia Weaver et al. supports work that I-TECH is already doing in three ways:
- The pre/post comparisons showed that high quality training, educational outreach, and CQI significantly improved the quality of care for emergencies, malaria, and pneumonia, and enrollment in HIV care.
- IDCAP demonstrates I-TECH’s capacity to measure the effects of training and other interventions to improve care and treatment, such as case scenarios/clinical vignettes, clinical observation, facility performance measures, and population-based mortality.
- The Overview article reports that efforts to improve data collection had an independent effect on the quality of care for two facility performance indicators. In other words, improving health information systems also serves as an intervention to improve the quality of care.
“I am grateful for the curriculum development ‘dream team,’” said Dr. Weaver, “including Ann Miceli and Lisa Rayko Farrar from I-TECH, for outstanding implementation by the Infectious Diseases Institute and University Research Co, LLC, and to Accordia Global Health Foundation for project leadership and Sarah Burnett’s excellent data management and analysis.”