Improving Notifications on the KIDSNET System

KIDSNET is a tool to help assist health care coordination. It facilitates the collection and appropriate sharing of health data by authorized users for the provision of timely and appropriate preventive health services and follow-up.

The first step that the quality improvement (QI) team took to accomplish the goal of this initiative was to review the EI policies and procedures that were already in place. The team worked with EI Agency A to review the data entry process into Welligent (the data system used by the EI agencies). Agency A is one of 11 EI agencies in Rhode Island and was selected to be part of the initiative because it had the largest number of delayed IFSP dates entered into KIDSNET. The team then had the agency eliminate the supervisor review step needed for data entry of referral and IFSP dates. The team analyzed whether this process change resulted in improvement.

The initiative introduced a process change (eliminating the supervisor review step) that resulted in exceeding the goal—from 45% to 64%. The program continues, however, to work to implement an electronic transfer process to automate the data submission for all agencies. This measure will be monitored to determine the need to work on other process improvements. The tangible products of this QI project are a storyboard and a PowerPoint presentation about the project and a reporting protocol.