Question

A 450-bed tertiary care center is in the final planning stages for a new outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT) clinic. The medical director is concerned about the potential for severe medication administration errors, given that patients will be responsible for managing their own intravenous infusions at home after initial training. To date, the clinic has not yet opened, and no adverse events have occurred. The director convenes a multidisciplinary team of infectious disease physicians, pharmacists, and nurses. The team's first task is to construct a detailed process map of the proposed OPAT workflow. For each step in the workflow, the team brainstorms potential failure points, the clinical consequences of those failures, and the current safeguards in place. They then assign numerical values to the severity of harm, the likelihood of occurrence, and the probability of detection. By multiplying these three values, the team generates an index score for each vulnerability to prioritize which workflow steps require immediate redesign before the clinic accepts its first patient. Which of the following quality improvement methodologies is the team employing?