Our Mission
The mission of ARCHI is to improve the access, quality and safety of healthcare and reduce disparities in health status and outcomes.
Programs
For some small community or rural facilities that may find it difficult to produce certain programs and services on their own, we provide simple solutions. We offer a variety of quality and patient safety programs, including peer review through case-based learning, benchmarking, assessment services, and database management and analysis.
Peer Review
The ARCHI Peer Review Program fosters improvement and safety in quality of health care by providing objective, impartial patient care reviews by a peer review committee consisting of medical staff members within a specialty.
Nursing Quality and Safety Collaborative
With the focus today on safe practice, the TAMHSC-Rural and Community Health Institute's Nursing Quality and Safety Collaborative (NQSC) program advances 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.
KSTAR Physician Resources
KSTAR stands for "Knowledge, Skills, Training, Assessment and Research." KSTAR is designed for the physician who needs an assessment program to demonstrate his/her quality of care or skills knowledge base. The vision of the TAMHSC-Rural and Community Health Institute 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 medical care provided.
Learn MoreKSTAR Nursing Assessment Program
KSTAR (Knowledge, Skills, Training, Assessment and Research) Nursing is a comprehensive program for nurses designed to perform a competency assessment and provide individualized remediation to ensure minimum nurse competency. KSTAR Nursing is modeled after our successful, similar program for physicians.
Patient Safety Organization / The Safety Net (TSN)
Rural hospitals can move away from paper "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 aggregated into reports for review.
Healthcare Data Integration (HDI)
TAMHSC-Rural and Community Health Institute'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.
Utilization Management
In striving to assist Texas rural hospitals in meeting utilization review requirements, the TAMHSC-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".
Quality Collaboration Meeting
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.
Center for Optimizing Rural Health
The Center concentrates its efforts on helping hospitals and communities recognize that their primary priority is to determine how to sustain critical health care services locally.
Medicare Beneficiary Quality Improvement Project (MBQIP)
ARCHI is working in collaboration with the State Office of Rural Health (SORH) and Texas Hospital Association Foundation (THAF) to assist Critical Access Hospitals in reporting MBQIP measures. We will provide information on MBQIP measures, reporting process for all III Phasses and how to use this data in quality improvement efforts.
ARCHI Virtual Training and Quality Improvement Project
The ARCHI Virtual Training and Quality Improvement Project is a 5 month webinar series that begins in May each year.
Webinars are scheduled monthly from May through September at 2:00pm Central time.
Interdisciplinary Ambulatory Case Review
Our clinic based Interdisciplinary Ambulatory Case Review (IAR) focuses on case-based learning to promote improvements in quality of care. The interdisciplinary approach recognizes the medical care provided by Physicians, Advanced Practice Nurses and Physician Assistants in the rural clinic setting and allows each practitioner to participate in our case-based reviews.
Rural Engagement Program
The Texas A&M Health Rural Engagement Program supports small-town health care providers in delivering high-quality care to the rural communities they serve. Working closely with each provider we support, we are expanding the rural health care workforce and bolstering the operational and financial viability of rural health care organizations throughout Texas.
"Ensuring safe, essential and effective health care is vital to the millions of Americans living in rural communities. Without adequate health care, rural communities cannot continue to thrive and be healthy. ARCHI is committed to ensuring rural populations continue to have access to high quality health care through providing quality and safety initiatives, education and technical expertise to rural health care organizations across the state and the nation.”
Kia Parsi, MD
Executive Director
News
Texas A&M awards technical assistance to St. Luke’s - The Tryon Daily Bulletin
St. Luke’s Hospital has been chosen by Texas A&M’s Center for Optimizing Rural Health (CORH) as one of 25 facilities, nationwide, to receive community assessment, strategic recommendations and on-going technical assistance and mentoring to help ensure a strong, focused critical access hospital network remains in place.
Bright Spots - Case Studies in Innovative Rural Healthcare
The Texas A&M Rural and Community Health Institute (ARCHI) comprises a team of dedicated researchers working to understand how to help rural communities achieve equitable access to healthcare. We have been honored to work with our funding partners, each a leader in healthcare systems improvement, to identify, understand, and disseminate the lessons of some of the most innovative health organizations in the nation.