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Telehealth and Quality Care

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Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in Orthopaedic Surgery

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Abstracts

Telehealth interventions have emerged as an innovative tool to provide high quality orthopedic care. Telehealth is the use of telecommunications to conduct virtual patient encounters. In recent years, and also fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals have grappled to implement and improve existing telehealth interventions. Quality improvement initiatives have allowed for the expansion of healthcare services to previously underserved communities.

The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is an agile theoretical framework for developing, testing, and implementing improvement initiatives. The principle of PDSA is to allow stakeholders the opportunity to learn quickly from small-scale testing, iterate the proposed intervention, and select successful ideas before widescale adoption.

Orthopedic telehealth interventions have reported high patient satisfaction and equivocal, or improved, patient outcomes. In this chapter, we describe the process of using the PDSA cycle to rapidly implement telehealth for a large tertiary academic hospital and describe its influence on orthopedic patient outcomes and satisfaction.

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Acknowledgements

Althea Anne D. Perez, MD, Eric M. Miliron, MD, Matthew R. Colatruglio, MD, Parker A. Cavendish, MD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Orthopaedics, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH, USA

    Janice M. Bonsu, Anna Farrell & Carmen Quatman

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  1. Janice M. Bonsu
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  2. Anna Farrell
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Correspondence to Janice M. Bonsu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Orthopedics, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH, USA

    Julie Balch Samora

  2. Department of Orthopedics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kevin G. Shea

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Bonsu, J.M., Farrell, A., Quatman, C. (2022). Telehealth and Quality Care. In: Samora, J.B., Shea, K.G. (eds) Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in Orthopaedic Surgery. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07105-8_30

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