Quality Assurance & Improvement Flashcards
7 cards from real CMC practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Quality Assurance & Improvement flashcards as text
Which metric is considered the gold standard for measuring door-to-balloon time in STEMI care?
Answer: Time from ED arrival to PCI wire crossing
Door-to-balloon time is measured from ED arrival to first balloon inflation (or wire crossing), the standard ACC/AHA benchmark being ≤90 minutes.
A cardiac care unit notices a spike in central-line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs). Which QI approach is most appropriate to identify root causes?
Answer: Run chart analysis followed by a fishbone diagram
Run charts visualize trends over time, and fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams systematically identify root causes — a standard QI pairing for infection spikes.
In the context of cardiac quality improvement, what does the term 'reliability' refer to?
Answer: The percentage of eligible patients who receive a recommended evidence-based intervention
Reliability in QI is the rate at which a care system delivers an evidence-based process to every patient who should receive it, targeting near-100% compliance.
A hospital is using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. In which phase would the team pilot a new rapid-response protocol on one unit?
Answer: Do
The 'Do' phase is where the planned change is executed or piloted, typically on a small scale before broader rollout.
Which of the following is an example of a balancing measure in a cardiac QI project aimed at reducing unnecessary telemetry use?
Answer: Rate of missed arrhythmia events after protocol change
Balancing measures detect unintended harm from an improvement intervention — here, missed arrhythmias would signal that reduced monitoring caused patient safety gaps.
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) National Database is primarily used for which quality improvement purpose?
Answer: Benchmarking cardiac surgical outcomes against national risk-adjusted norms
The STS National Database enables hospitals to compare their risk-adjusted outcomes (mortality, morbidity, complication rates) against national benchmarks to drive quality improvement.
Which statistical tool is most useful for distinguishing common-cause variation from special-cause variation in cardiac quality data?
Answer: Statistical process control (SPC) chart
SPC charts (control charts) use control limits to identify whether variation is random (common-cause) or due to a specific assignable cause (special-cause), guiding appropriate responses.