Course Goals

The goals of this EQIPP Newborn Screening: Evaluate and Improve Your Practice course are to:
• Acquaint you with the NBS and EHDI policies endorsed by the AAP and the state NBS programs, which mutually outline the PCPs’ explicit responsibilities for newborn DBS and hearing screening.
• Help you create plans for improvement to address gaps identified in key clinical activities of newborn screening. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
• Recognize the responsibilities of PCPs, including the following:
• Establish clear office procedures for timely and effective newborn DBS and hearing screening follow-up.
• Adhere to state-mandated and optional DBS and hearing screening requirements and reporting procedures.
• Monitor all DBS and hearing screening by adhering to state processes and by using AAP-recommended newborn screening policies, algorithms, and decision support tools to guide actions.
• Inform, educate, and address family concerns throughout the newborn screening process.
• Document all newborn screening services, results, and family discussions.
• Establish and coordinate long-term care for patients with conditions identified by newborn screening, which may entail comanaged care developed in partnership with the family. (Developing and maintaining a patient registry for patients with special health-care needs can aid in this effort.)
• Measure and improve care delivery and processes concerning newborn DBS and hearing screening by doing the following:
  • Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
    • Identify one or more performance gaps in one or more key activities of newborn screening.
    • Create an improvement plan for closing identified performance gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
      • AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
      • MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
      • CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
    • Test your ideas quickly, on a small scale, so you can determine if the changes lead to improvement.
    • Collect and analyze follow-up data to measure the results of your test.
    • Determine how to sustain successful changes and how to systematically integrate them into the culture, processes, and workflow of your practice.
  • Create additional improvement plans and repeat PDSA cycles until you reach the maximum potential of providing optimal newborn screening for infants in your practice.