1. National Quality Center Measuring the Processing of Technical Assistance Requests An NQC Quality Improvement Project

2. National Quality Center AIM Statement NQC is committed to responding to Ryan White Program grantees that request technical assistance in a timely manner.

3. National Quality Center Purpose of this Project To examine the amount of time it takes NQC to respond to TA requests by grantees To make improvements, if necessary, in the flow of TA requests that are processed by NQC Staff

4. National Quality Center TA Request Flow Chart

5. National Quality Center Data Collection NQC has employed an Excel spreadsheet over the life of the program to track TA milestones NQC had formally used the metric: “number of days till first call was held with grantee to discuss TA project” While performance was good, the NQC response was being judged on when a grantee may be available to hold a call

6. National Quality Center Developing a New Measure It was decided that NQC would judge its responsiveness to the TA request with a new measure: “number of days it took NQC to respond to the TA request” The new measure specifically examines NQC’s responsiveness to grantee TA requests unfettered by other confounding events

7. National Quality Center Results NQC responded to 80% of TA requests in 2 days or less Analysis revealed that one email was not forwarded correctly and one was accidently deleted

8. National Quality Center Discussion The procedure by which NQC processes TA requests is, for the most part, reliable. Emailing of documents does present its challenges due to ever increased cyber-security threats resulting in more restrictive firewalls and spam filters. Internal errors accounted for the 2 TA requests that were not responded to in 2 days or under. This indicated the need to make adjustments to the way information was delivered to NQC and ensuring it made its way to the responsible parties for TA requests. In addition, human error cause the accidental deletion of one email. NQC has an account with an email provider and all TA request emails go to this account and are then forwarded to NQC’s regular email addresses. To ensure this does not happen in the future, the tracking log is compared to the email inbox on a bi- weekly basis to ensure this does not happen again.

9. National Quality Center Improvement Ideas The next iteration of the TA request form will be in Adobe PDF format Form can be emailed to NQC’s email account specifically designated for TA request forms Grantees can type into the form, save it and email it to NQC NQC’s TA request form email account will be set up with a auto response to let the grantee know it was received and procedures to follow-up with NQC if the request was not responded to in 72 hours