New
website offers
Hospital Performance Data
that can save lives
Newswise — The American Health
Quality Association today urged consumers and hospital leaders to
take advantage of individual hospital performance reports that will
be posted on a new federal website, Hospital Compare (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov)
which goes live on Friday April 1, 2005. The site will carry data on
more than 4200 hospitals nationwide and will be updated quarterly.
“The site shows consumers how
often their local hospitals are using procedures known to give
patients the best chance of surviving and recovering from heart
attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and other serious illnesses,” said
David Schulke, Executive Vice President of the American Health
Quality Association (AHQA), which represents the national network of
health care Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs).
“This information about hospitals
will save lives not only by encouraging consumers to be vigilant,
but also because it will motivate hospital boards and executives to
engage more extensively in the quality improvement activities of
their staff and physicians,” Schulke said.
Site Could Spark Hospital
Improvement
The new Hospital Compare website
shows that hospitals vary tremendously from one to another in their
performance. It also shows that the quality of care varies a great
deal within the walls of a single hospital. For example, a hospital
may provide excellent care for pneumonia patients, but fall far
short of the best care for heart attack patients.
Schulke noted, “When hospitals
advertise to consumers, they market the whole institution, but there
is nothing about working under the same roof that ensures that
physicians and clinical teams will work together effectively. A
primary determinant of hospital quality is how well teams of health
care professionals communicate and support each other every day in
each clinical service. Hospital management can improve quality for
their entire institutions by making the variation of quality
performance in distinct clinical areas the top agenda item in every
board meeting, and by supporting efforts by clinical teams to work
together more effectively on the front lines of care.”
The Hospital Compare website
results from collaboration between the federal Centers for Medicare
& Medicare Services (CMS) and the Hospital Quality Alliance,
involving the American Hospital Association, the Federation of
American Hospitals and the American Association of Medical Colleges.
Hospital data for the site is reported voluntarily to CMS.
A major goal of the site is to
allow hospital board members and senior executives to see how their
hospitals stack up against other local institutions and national
averages. “Hospital Compare will show hospital leaders where they
need to improve,” Schulke said. “Hospitals want to do the best for
their patients. We hope that publishing this information will
motivate them to invest more in working with doctors, pharmacists
and nurses to improve the quality of care.”
The quality measures reported on
Hospital Compare currently reflect hospital efforts to deliver
effective care for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia. The
site is expected to soon add information on hospital performance in
other clinical areas where use of best practices has a critical
impact on patient safety, such as procedures that can be
successfully used to avoid surgical infections.
Under contract to Medicare, QIOs
have been working with hospitals around the country in these
clinical areas for more than a decade, providing onsite training in
the implementation of best practices. In an effort to teach hospital
staff how to monitor their own quality, over the past two years QIOs
have also been helping hospitals abstract, submit and validate data
on these measures.
“As hospitals make a commitment to
use performance data to drive quality improvement programs, there is
a QIO in every state ready to assist. This is a service paid for by
Medicare to improve quality and reduce costly errors that harm the
elderly and disabled, and we encourage hospitals to take advantage
of it.” Schulke said.
On the AHQA website at
www.ahqa.org, hospitals can find contact information for local QIOs
as well as identify hundreds of hospitals working with QIOs to
implement best practices in all clinical areas reported on Hospital
Compare.
Quality measures on Hospital Compare for heart attacks, for example,
show the percentage of patients at each hospital given aspirin at
arrival, aspirin at discharge, beta blockers at arrival, beta
blockers at discharge, and ACE inhibitors for left ventricular
systolic dysfunction. Patients who should not receive aspirin or
these other drugs are not included in the calculation of the
hospital’s quality performance in providing treatment.
Examples of QIO success working
with hospitals to improve heart attack care are listed below.
*Sparks Regional Medical Center,
working with the Arkansas QIO, the Arkansas Foundation for Medical
Care, increased use of beta-blockers at admission to treat heart
attacks from 56% in January 2002 to 92% in February 2003. B eta-blockers
given at discharge increased from 53% to 91% in the same period.
*Saint Mary’s Regional Medical
Center in Reno worked with HealthInsight, the Nevada QIO, to raise
aspirin at arrival from 89% to 100%; aspirin at discharge from 89%
to 99%; and beta blocker at arrival from 64% to 98%.
*Berkshire Medical Center worked
with MassPRO, the Massachusetts QIO to increasing aspirin at
discharge for cardiac patients from 96% to 100%; smoking cessation
counseling from 43% to 100%; ACE-inhibitor use from 67% to 88%; and
referral to cardiac rehabilitation from 14% to 98%.
*Working with MPRO, the Michigan QIO, the University of Michigan
Medical Center increased aspirin on admission for heart attack from
88.98% to 100%, beta-blockers on admission from 75% to 100, and
aspirin at discharge from 85.7% to 100%.
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