Improving Ambulatory Smoking Cessation Counseling Across a Large Academic Internal Medicine Department

Smoking is a preventable cause of death and morbidity. A department-wide quality improvement initiative was implemented to increase smoking cessation counseling and referral rates as part of a composite metric, which was tied to a faculty incentive. Eligible individuals were current smokers seen in any of 52 internal medicine clinics for a 12-month period. An infographic, a quality improvement newsletter, and outreach to leadership were used to increase awareness about the metric to stakeholders and to provide example workflows. To satisfy the metric, clinic staff offered a nicotine cessation clinic referral to tobacco users at the time of rooming in. If patients agreed, a referral order was pended for the provider to sign. If patients did not agree, literature on smoking cessation was appended to a patient's after-visit summary. Smoking cessation counseling was then documented in the electronic medical record. Rates were serially monitored at the individual clinic and health system level on a centralized, cloud-based dashboard. For a 12-month period, the composite of smoking cessation counseling and referral rates rose from a baseline of 8.6% to 25.6%. Referrals to nicotine cessation clinics increased during the first half of the period but did not during the second half.