All Posts Tagged With: "outcomes"
To Improve Hospital Care, Improve the Board
When Health Affairs surveyed a nationally representative sample of board chairs of 1,000 U.S. not-for-profit hospitals, it found that fewer than half rated quality of care as one of their two top priorities, and only one-third of the boards received formal quality training. Only 63% included quality performance on every board agenda.
The magazine ranked the hospitals by publicly-reported quality measures for acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia. As the abstract for the article describing the survey concluded, “The large differences in board activities between high-performing and low-performing hospitals we found suggest that governing boards may be an important target for intervention for policymakers hoping to improve care in U.S. hospitals.” You can read the article online here.
The Baldrige Criteria address senior leaders’ responsibilities for improving the quality of care but do not specifically link this to hospitals’ boards. The Criteria ask how you evaluate the performance of board members and how you use those reviews to improve the effectiveness of individual members and of the board as a whole.
Based on the findings of the Health Affairs study, hospitals would benefit from providing formal quality training for their board members, making the hospital’s quality performance a part of every board meeting, and…
11Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMeasuring Quality in Healthcare
The quality of healthcare has always been an issue but now it’s front-page news as part of the healthcare reform debate. In the July 2009 Quality Progress, Janusz J. Godyn, M.D., takes issue with institutions that define healthcare quality by how patients and families perceive it. According to Godyn, “third-party payers should reward hospitals for maximizing quality of care, while patients should reward hospitals for quality of service.” Of the two, he states that “there is no doubt that quality of care is more important and should shape the meaning of quality in healthcare.”
He proposes three models to measure quality of care, none of which is a panacea:
- Measurable results of medical outcome
- Compliance with the best evidence-based practice
- Ethics plus knowledge and skills plus equipment minus poor safety practices
Godyn also takes issue with the Baldrige Criteria for healthcare, arguing that the Award “focuses on human perceptions of quality as drivers of actual quality in healthcare.”
He’s wrong. Item 7.1 specifically asks for the results of healthcare outcomes-the quality of care. Item 7.2 asks for results of patient satisfaction-the quality of service. Item 7.1 is worth 100 points, which is the largest total for any Item in the Criteria. Item 7.2 is worth 70…
28Jul2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
