A leading surgery team suspected that some of their patients might be experiencing disparities in outcomes. But, which patients, exactly? And for which procedures and which outcomes?
The complexities of surgical operations often obscure inequities – with countless procedures across thousands of patients, and endless combinations of clinicians and staff, disparities can be difficult to identify.
Even when health equity issues are known, how can clinical leaders act effectively? Without a practical way to rapidly assess and adapt equity interventions, how can clinicians drive equity "improvement" instead of mere "change"? The surgical team cared deeply about equity, but they struggled to move beyond management-by-intuition to truly address equity issues.
Surgery leadership used AdaptX to identify and assess hidden disparities. In just minutes, AdaptX enabled the team to look across thousands of patients, procedures, and outcomes to diagnose problematic treatments and outcomes.
To their dismay, the team discovered that Asian and Hispanic patients were much more likely to return to the OR for post-operative bleeding after their institution’s most common surgeries.
Believing that their team shared a deep commitment to equity principles, surgery leadership educated their physicians and nurses about the problems they had uncovered, and they invited innovations that might reduce post-op disparities for Asian and Hispanic patients. Then, the team used AdaptX to assess the performance of their interventions, to ask critical new questions, and to adapt their approach. Because AdaptX is self-serve for clinicians, they were able to evaluate new ideas on-the-fly, dramatically accelerating their management cycles.
Over the following months, the team iterated a series of continuously-improving interventions, guided by their own real-world data. As a result, the team closed the equity gaps they had identified for their Asian and Hispanic patients!