E-QUAL: Revolutionizing Emergency Care with Quality Improvement Initiatives

The Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL) is a free, low-burden quality improvement program made for emergency departments (EDs) by emergency physicians.

It engages emergency physicians and leverages EDs to improve clinical outcomes, streamline coordination of care, and reduce costs. Dedicated champions within various EDs will complete eight to ten short activities on our recently revamped, comprehensive online platform throughout the six to nine month-long initiatives. These activities have been meticulously designed to demand minimal effort, ensuring alignment with ongoing quality improvement endeavors of each unique ED.

E-QUAL has three initiatives for 2024: Venous Thromboembolism (VTE), Stroke, and Substance Abuse Disorder (SUD). The goals of the initiatives are to:

• Improve discharges for low-risk pulmonary embolism (PE) and improve identification and treatment of high-risk PE.
• Increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and value of acute stroke diagnosis and treatment.
• Reduce SUD-related harm and mortality by meeting patients during crisis with evidence-based interventions.

E-QUAL's track record exemplifies a proven formula for success. Since its inception in 2017, the program has achieved the following remarkable milestones:

• Active engagement with over 32,000 Emergency Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants from over 1,400 EDs.
• Over $55,000,000 was saved from fewer avoidable imaging studies and hospitalizations.
• Thirty thousand fewer patients harmed by ionizing radiation.
• Twenty-five thousand lives saved from better sepsis care.
• 35% decline in opioids administered in the ED.

Participation in E-QUAL presents an array of advantages. This encompasses receiving customized reports that evaluate your ED's practices and provide benchmarking against performance metrics from all E-QUAL-affiliated sites. Additionally, participants can earn Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) Improvement Activities (IAs) credit, gain recognition as a Quality Improvement (QI) leader by acquiring a certificate of completion, and achieve E-QUAL Honor Roll Status. Finally, enrollment also grants access to ACEP's wealth of free educational resources, including a CME-accredited podcast channel called Qual-ED, relevant clinical policies, and research papers.

Embrace the opportunity to enroll in E-QUAL to join the largest and most reputable practice-learning network dedicated to EDs. There is no cost to enroll, and we do not collect Protected Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Enrollment will launch on our website in October.

Have questions? Reach out to the E-QUAL Team at equal@acep.org.