• Utilize service data as an opportunity to become a Patient Safety Organization (PSO)
• Identify opportunities to improve patient care and safety through programmatic analysis of data from peer review, Rural Health Occurrence Reporter and the Texas Rural Hospital Partnership
• Develop and expand marketable products impacting safety, quality, medical staff affairs and utilization management

The Texas A&M Health Science Center Rural and Community Health Institute (RCHI) Peer Review Program fosters improvement and safety in quality of health care by providing objective, impartial patient care reviews by a peer review committee consiting of medical staff members within a specialty. (read more >>)

With the focus today on safe practice, the Rural and Community Health Institute's Nursing Quality and Safety Collaborative (NQSF) mission is to advance safe nursing practice through a multi-institutional collaboration that promotes patient safety and quality of care.

The program will utilize a systems approach to conduct impartial, objective reviews by nursing peers. (read more >>)

KSTAR stands for "Knowledge," "Skills," "Training," "Assessment" and "Research."  KSTAR is designed for the physician who needs an assessment program to demonstrate the quality of his/her care or his/her skills knowledge base. The vision of the RCHI KSTAR program is to encourage and stimulate medical practice improvement in an environment that allows for individualized and tailored assessment, education and training to create high-performing physicians and improve the safety and quality of provided medical care. (read more >>)

Rural hospitals can move away from paper "incident" report forms for an automated approach to monitoring and evaluating occurrences, near misses and unsafe conditions in hospitals. This program provides the opportunity for rural hospitals to electronically enter data into a secure HIPAA-compliant, web-based data repository.  Data then can be quickly transformed into reports for review. (read more >>)

RCHI's HDI program provides hospitals with a service to streamline flow of accurate and complete data to monitor clinical quality and financial performance. The program allows for more timely abstraction, provides concurrent reporting, performs submissions to regulatory/accrediting agencies, has report card capability and is an excellent resource for individual, state and national benchmarking. (read more >>)

In striving to assist Texas rural hospitals in meeting utilization review requirements, the Rural and Community Health Institute offers the availability of evidenced-based standards of care criteria through a group purchase option with McKesson Health Solutions called InterQual Level of Care.

The Quality Collaboration Meeting is a quarterly webinar that gives many Texas rural hospitals the opportunity to discuss current quality/patient safety topics in an open forum with key staff in similar facilities. (read more >>)

RCHI provides health care consulting that is dedicated to fulfilling the special needs of small and rural health care organizations by offering a customized, cost-effective approach to consultation based on the needs of our customers.