We strongly recommend you form a core QI team that fulfills the following roles:
- Physician champion: Serves as a conduit between leadership and frontline staff
- A lead clinician: Supports the day-to-day activities of the QI project
- Data analyst/data support: A dedicated person to analyze, interpret, and submit data
- Nurse navigator, social worker, or behavioral health clinician: Facilitates internal and external referrals, can provide behavioral counseling, and is familiar with local, state, and national resources
Step 1: Form a core Beyond ASK QI team. Obtain leadership and/or cancer committee support
Step 2: Assess current strategies and systems used to support cancer patients in smoking cessation
Step 3: Identify barriers and facilitators to building new or enhancing existing systems for offering smoking cessation
Step 4: Consider interventions. While more information on implementable changes is listed in the Beyond ASK Change Package, evaluate your internal workflow, assess your information technology needs, and grow your referral network beyond your program, if no “in-house” smoking cessation referrals exist. Ready clinical providers and staff to be able to offer assistance through educational events and seek out or create patient facing cessation resources.
Step 5: Run at least one PDSA cycle. Develop a small test of change that can be implemented to better understand how the intervention has helped, or hindered, your program’s ability to offer assistance to cancer patients regarding smoking cessation. For CoC programs, while you may start small (in one clinic area) you will be expected to demonstrate growth to other clinics over the course of the year.
Step 6: Annotate what interventions were implemented and how that impacted your program’s ability to offer assistance based on the bi-monthly data submission.
Step 7: Meaningfully participate and engage in the QI project.
Programs could elect to claim either CoC credit or NAPBC credit, but not both.
Completing the Beyond ASK project will fulfill the following Standards for 2023:
- CoC- Quality Improvement Initiative 7.3
OR
- NAPBC- Quality and Outcomes 6.1 (counts toward one of two studies)
For Network Accreditations (INCP/NCIN) to receive credit, BOTH of the following criteria must be met:
- All network children within the network each submit their own questionnaire series; AND
- At least 20% of the network analytic caseload must be impacted by the interventions implemented.
This required that the network organizations coordinated with each other to ensure that at least 20% of the total network population is impacted by the interventions.
Submit questions to cancerQI@facs.org.
