Continuous Quality Improvement

Targeted Solutions Tool

The Targeted Solutions Tool™ (TST) is an online application developed by the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare to help Joint Commission accredited organizations solve some of the most persistent health care quality and safety problems.

The TST guides organizations through a step-by-step process to accurately measure actual organizational performance, identify organizational barriers to excellent performance, and then direct the organization to proven solutions that are customized to address their particular barriers. The TST also provides tips and guidance for sustaining a comprehensive improvement process.

The TST is available for use in three areas as of November 2012: improving hand hygiene compliance, reducing the risk of wrong site surgery, and improving hand-off communications. It will be expanded in the future to include solutions for other Center projects, including surgical site infections, heart failure hospitalizations, safety culture, preventing falls, and sepsis.

NMCP is devoted to improving our performance in hand hygiene compliance. In the winter of 2011, NMCP adopted the WIWO (wash in and wash out) hand hygiene campaign. As a result, our compliance rates increased but we knew we could do better. We implemented the use of the TST for hand hygiene compliance in January 2013. The TST provided us the foundation and framework of an improvement method that assisted us to significantly improve our hand hygiene compliance thereby contributing to our efforts to reduce the frequency of heath care associated infections. We are excited and pleased to share our results!