Overall project management and administration was conducted via co-leadership of the Principal Investigators and Project Directors from Denver Health and Intermountain Healthcare, Connie Savor Price, M.D. and Lucy A. Savitz, Ph.D., M.B.A. Denver Health acted as the prime contractor and was responsible for oversight of the collaboration, which was funded through the Accelerating Change and Transformation in Organizations and Networks (ACTION) mechanism. Susan L. Moore, M.S.P.H., served as the ACTION project coordinator and as such was the primary point of contact in facilitating and coordinating communications with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the research team.
To maintain clear and regular communication, monthly conference calls were held between key project stakeholders, including Kendall Hall, M.D., who represented AHRQ as the Task Order Officer (TOO); Sandra Berrios-Torres, Teresa Horan, and Jonathan Edwards, who together represented CDC as Technical Experts; and the research team leadership from Denver Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City VAMC, and Vail Valley Medical Center. The calls were scheduled on a regular basis to occur on the third Tuesday of each month. A call-in number was established and used for all calls. Agendas and supporting materials for the calls were distributed to the group every Friday before the scheduled calls, to allow sufficient time to review agenda items. Appendix A* provides agendas and meeting summaries for these calls.
Following the first teleconference with the TOO and Technical Experts, the project team determined that internal preparation and coordination teleconferences should be scheduled on a regular basis. The internal team calls were scheduled on the second Tuesday of every month. To ensure adherence to the project work plan, the team call agendas were driven by the project work plan timeline and deliverable schedule. The progress of each task was discussed during each call, and any issues or challenges of the work were discussed as a team.
The team-building value of face-to-face meetings was considered important, both early in the project and on a regular basis throughout. The first team meeting was scheduled in Salt Lake City, Utah on November, 20, 2009. At the meeting, the overall project goals were discussed, project management and logistics were reviewed, and the progress of each task was discussed at length. A second meeting was held in Salt Lake City, Utah on October, 15, 2010. The project milestones and deliverables were reviewed with specific focus on the project timeline and end date. Several challenges and updates were discussed at length, most notably, the nursing focus group was proposed to be repurposed to present use cases for the surveillance tool; and the plans for dissemination of the project work were discussed. The TOO and Technical Experts were included in the meeting via teleconference for part of the meeting to review the project updates. A final face-to-face meeting was held in Vail, Colorado on January 27-28, 2011 as a writing session to finalize the draft final report for the project. Summary notes from these in-person meetings are provided in Appendix B.
Monthly progress reports covered the work done in the previous month and included concise updates of:
- What was accomplished for each task during the reporting period.
- Problems or delays the contractor has experienced in the conduct of performance requirements, including what specific action is proposed to alleviate the problem(s) and a revised timetable.
- Activities planned for the next reporting period, including anticipated staffing requirements, level of effort, and cost.
To keep all parties informed of the monthly progress, the reports were submitted electronically through AHRQ. Research and Reporting System (ARRS), with duplicates delivered by email to the TOO, Technical Experts, and AHRQ's Contracting Officer. We have explored with AHRQ the opportunity to engage in a variety of dissemination activities. Three presentations, two poster and one oral, have been given at national meetings and two papers are planned for submission to the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) and an open-access, peer-reviewed journal such as Implementation Science. This is discussed further in Chapter 5.
* The Appendixes are available on the AHRQ Web site at http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/final-reports/ssi/index.html, as part of the HTML version of the Report. Unlike the Report, the Appendixes are unedited.
