Measure, Report, Improve: The Quest for Best Practices for High-Quality Care in Critical Care Transport

There has been increasing attention nationally to the quality of care provided by critical care transport teams. Much of this has been fostered by benchmarking work done in overlapping fields of medicine. Another important catalyst has been the landmark work by the Institute of Medicine-Crossing the Quality Chasm. Organizations such as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation have mature and transparent processes for measuring quality of care at different hospital systems, allowing these programs to compare themselves to others and learn from the high performers. The field of pediatric and neonatal critical care transport strives to do the same but has only recently begun to develop the performance measures and benchmarking strategies necessary to do this work. This article describes examples of quality improvement measurement and benchmarking, reviews important concepts related to continuous quality improvement, and introduces the reader to the consensus quality metrics established by the Ohio Neonatal/Pediatric Transport Quality Improvement Collaborative and by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Section on Transport Medicine.