Using Data-Driven Implementation Strategies to Improve the Quality of Cirrhosis Care

This Veteran Affairs (VA) Quality Improvement project aims to understand which data-driven implementation strategies promote evidence based practices that improve high-quality care for Veterans with cirrhosis.

Nearly 120,000 Veterans in care have cirrhosis, or advanced liver disease, from alcohol, hepatitis C, fatty liver disease, or other causes, and this number is rapidly increasing. There are life-saving measures that providers can take to prevent harm from cirrhosis. The three most impactful of these measures include providing access to post-discharge follow-up and screening for liver cancer and esophageal varices (veins that can cause catastrophic bleeding). However, only about one-third of Veterans receive care aligned with these three evidence-based practices (EBPs). Therefore, there is an urgent need to improve access to high-quality care for Veterans with this common condition. By focusing on strategies that most successfully encourage implementation of evidence-based practices the investigators can address the urgent need to improve the quality and timeliness of care for Veterans with cirrhosis who receive care at VA hospitals. This quality improvement intervention seeks to understand which implementation strategies, or discrete activities that are conducted to promote EBP implementation, improve cirrhosis care. The aims of this evaluation are to: (1) empirically determine which combinations of implementation strategies ('data-driven strategies') are associated with the successful implementation of EBPs for Veterans with cirrhosis, (2) use Intervention Mapping to operationalize the 'data-driven' implementation strategies developed in the first aim, and (3) evaluate whether applying data-driven implementation strategies increases the use of EBPs for cirrhosis, using a hybrid type III stepped wedge cluster randomized trial. The investigators will measure cirrhosis care at all VA sites and use the data from aims 1 and 2 to provide feedback to all sites. The investigators anticipate that more intensive implementation interventions will directly impact 12 of the lowest-performing sites.