Implementing an Obesity Management Program in Primary Care

The prevalence of obesity is rising steadily, leading to increased risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Primary care clinics often lack resources and programs to properly manage obesity. For this project, you could develop an evidence-based obesity management program for implementation in a primary care setting. This would involve creating evaluation and treatment protocols, educational materials for patients, training materials for staff, and processes for ongoing patient monitoring and support. You would implement the program in the clinic over 6-12 months, collect data on participant outcomes like weight loss and biometric measures, and evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

Promoting Preventive Screening Services

Many preventive screening tests are underutilized, missing opportunities for early disease detection. For this project you could focus on improving one specific screening rate like colorectal cancer or cervical cancer screening. Activities may include assessing current screening rates, identifying barriers to screening, developing interventions like patient reminders and education, provider prompts, and reducing structural barriers. The program would be implemented over 6-12 months and data collected on screening rates before and after to evaluate impact. Qualitative data from patients and providers could also provide insight into successes and areas for improvement.

Managing Chronic Conditions through Group Visits

Group visits are an alternative model of care that has shown success in managing chronic diseases long-term. For this project, you could implement a group visit program for a specific condition like diabetes or hypertension. Activities would involve developing standardized group visit curricula, protocols, and scheduling; training facilitators; recruiting and enrolling eligible patients; and conducting the visits. Outcome data on clinical indicators, self-management, and patient satisfaction could be collected and compared to traditional individual visits. A qualitative evaluation from patients and providers would also assess acceptability and areas for refinement of the group visit model.

Implementing a Telehealth Program

Telehealth expands access to care, especially important in underserved rural areas. For this project, you could implement a telehealth program using videoconferencing technology for remote specialty consultations or regular primary care follow-ups. This would involve selecting a specialty to partner with (e.g. dermatology), assessing needed equipment and IT infrastructure, developing workflows and staff training, identifying eligible established patients, conducting initial telehealth visits over several months, and evaluating the program’s impact on access, outcomes, costs and patient/provider satisfaction compared to usual care. Data collection tools would need to be developed to comprehensively assess program outcomes.

Improving Transitions of Care from Hospital to Home

Readmissions are common after hospitalization, often due to gaps in care coordination and management of complex medical and social needs. For this project, you could work to reduce 30-day readmissions for a specific high-risk patient population like heart failure patients. Activities may include developing standardized discharge protocols, embedding a transitional care nurse or pharmacist in the hospital, implementing home visits within 3 days of discharge, ensuring timely follow-up appointments are scheduled, and use of telemonitoring if available. Collecting readmission rates before and after implementing these interventions could determine the program’s effectiveness at improving transitions of care and reducing readmissions.

Standardizing Treatment of a Chronic Condition

Practice variation in screening and management of conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia is common. To address this, you could develop evidence-based treatment protocols and clinical practice guidelines for one particular chronic disease tailored to your practice setting. This would involve an extensive literature review to identify best practices, formatting protocols in an easy to use manner, developing tools to monitor adherence, evaluating current treatment patterns, implementing the protocols over time, and collecting data on clinical outcomes to see if standardizing care improves quality metrics. Provider and patient surveys could provide insights into adopting evidence-based protocols into daily practice.

Each of these potential capstone project ideas are strongly evidence-based, aim to implement quality improvement programs focused on either disease prevention, chronic disease management, or care coordination – which are all priorities in primary care. The draft proposals provide realistic planning and timelines over 6-12 months, outline important process and outcome metrics to measure success, and emphasize collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Implementing any of these programs in a primary care clinic setting could demonstrate a DNP graduate’s advanced competencies in developing, implementing, and evaluating an evidence-based practice change initiative.