All Posts Tagged With: "patient outcomes"
Catholic Healthcare Systems Excel
According to a Thomson Reuters study conducted for Modern Healthcare, Catholic-owned healthcare systems perform significantly better than investor-owned, for-profit systems.
The study used federally reported core quality measures along with inpatient mortality and complications rates, an inpatient safety index, 30-day mortality and readmission rates, average length of stay, and patients’ perceptions of care. A composite score across all of these measures was computed for 255 systems. The 36 Catholic systems had an average rank of 84 (lower is better), while “other church” systems came in at 121, secular not-for-profit systems scored 129, and investor-owned systems were at 182.
Eleven healthcare systems have won the Baldrige Award and all are not-for-profit. The first healthcare system to receive the Award, SSM, is a large Catholic system with 15 hospitals and two nursing homes in four states.
According to Jean Chenoweth at Thomson Reuters, “health systems owned by the Catholic Church may be the most active in setting and monitoring achievement of quality goals as well as aligning the management of hospitals within a system in achieving what they see as a mission.” That’s a good description of all 11 Baldrige healthcare winners.
You can read more about these winners by clicking on their profiles, which are two-page…
11Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Saves Lives
According to Rulon Stacey, president and CEO of Poudre Valley Health System, there are people alive today because of what PVHS has done with Baldrige. PHVS, which won the Baldrige Award in 2008, will receive the Award from President Obama in a ceremony on December 2.
Located in northern Colorado, PVHS has 4,300 employees, 600 physicians, and 900 volunteers. It started integrating Baldrige in 1999. “It was a big time of change for Poudre Valley Health System,” said Pam Brock, vice president of marketing. “We’d gone through five CEOs in four years and we had a 25% turnover rate. The organization was struggling and this was when Rulon first became CEO. He knew we needed something to take the organization to a different place.” (“PVHS goes to Washington—finally,” Steve Porter, Northern Colorado Business Report, November 20, 2009)
Its results point to a very different place. Modern Healthcare magazine named it one of “America’s 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare” in 2008. Poudre Valley Hospital was recognized as the nation’s number one hospital for sustained nursing excellence in 2007 and 2008. For five consecutive years, Poudre Valley Hospital has been one of seven U.S. hospitals named a Thomson 100 Top Hospital for superior outcomes,…
23Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedTo 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 | ContinuedStrategic Challenges for Hospitals
According to an annual survey by the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), 77% of the approximately 1,100 hospital CEOs who responded identified financial challenges as one of the top three issues confronting their hospitals. Patient safety and quality ranked second according to 43% of respondents, while care for the uninsured was third at 41%.
When asked what specific concerns faced their hospitals in the area of patient safety and quality, redesigning care processes and redesigning the work environment to reduce errors both received 66%, compliance with accrediting organizations got 60%, and medication errors was identified by 57% of respondents.
These strategic challenges help explain why healthcare organizations now account for roughly half of all Baldrige applications despite being one of six categories: Financial challenges, which are exacerbated by caring for the uninsured, are forcing hospitals to be as efficient as possible while still providing safe, high-quality patient care. The Baldrige model helps hospitals address all of these challenges by understanding how their management systems work, where their greatest opportunities for improvement are, and how they can make dramatic improvements quickly.
The nine hospitals and medical centers that have received the Baldrige Award demonstrate how to tackle all of these challenges at the same…
23Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
