All Entries Tagged With: "data management"
How does your hospital’s patient safety culture compare?
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture: 2011 User Comparative Database Report. You can compare your hospital’s culture to 1,032 others in the U.S.
The survey was developed in 2004 to help hospitals assess their patient safety culture in 2004. The first benchmarking database was released in 2007 and included data from 382 hospitals.
Out of 472,397 staff working in these hospitals, teamwork within units had the most positive response (80%). Most also rated their hospital well in regard to managers listening to input from staff about patient safety and praising staff for following patient safety protocol (75%).
Staff did not rate their hospitals as well when it came to creating a nonpunitive response to error (44%), or implementing safe handoffs and transitions (45%).
Interestingly, 54% of respondents, on average, reported no adverse events in their hospital over the past year, an indication of possible underreporting.
The survey results urge me to do a bit of promoting of two books I truly think readers might have interest in:
First is Creating a Just Culture: A Nurse Leader’s Guide. The authors go into detail about what it actually takes to create a nonpunitive culture (hint: it’s not easy, but in time it can be done!). It’s an easy read that provides sample incident reporting policies, a sample just culture principles document, case scenarios, advice on disclosure, and more.
Second is Occurrence Reporting: Building a Robust Problem Identification and Resolution Process. What’s to love about this book? It takes the overwhelming process of event reporting and whittles it down, giving advice on which events to collect, which events to focus on, how to implement a system that staff actually use, how to make sure actual, quality improvement actions come out of all the work, etc.
Okay, I’ve said my piece. Now say yours: Does this report surprise you? Does your hospital leadership let you know where you stand, comparatively? What’s holding up nonpunitive culture and event reporting? Share your thoughts below.
Rounding by social media
Every so often I like to highlight something from Patient Safety Monitor Journal, the monthly newsletter of PatientSafetyMonitor.com. Catherine Hinz, our monthly columnist, often brings new thoughts and ideas to those in quality and patient safety, and so I thought you may find this interesting.
The following is an excerpt of a column written by Columnist Catherine Hinz, MHA, who currently works at PatientSafe Solutions, Inc. Previously, she served as the patient lead at HealthEast Care System in St. Paul, MN, worked for seven years as an ED health unit coordinator, and has completed a patient safety internship with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
I rounded frequently when I was in operations, and it could become quite frustrating. Although my time on the units was certainly well spent and valuable, there was a lack of data synthesis upon returning to my office. How could I glean more understanding, spread the information, praise our employees, and implement improvement activities per my colleagues’ suggestions? Sometimes it felt like rounding on employees to gain insight and understanding into the pulse of the front line could have been my full-time job.
At a seminar I recently attended, I threw out this question to all the leaders: What is your return on investment of ¬employee rounding? Many of the leaders couldn’t clearly articulate an answer beyond gathering a ¬variety of stories that could be broadly shared throughout the organization.
Although I wholly support the act of employee rounding, the method in which it is done today seems remarkably inefficient in a highly mobile, socially networked world. Of course, a leader would never want to lose face-to-face visibility on units with staff, but by harnessing a variety of the social networks available (texting, Twitter, Facebook, a hospital’s own internal networks), there lies an answer to help very busy operational leaders reach their staff on an individual, real-time, and automated basis that ultimately produces a streamlined, traceable, and, most importantly, actionable exhaust of information. It also provides a mechanism which the majority of frontline staff members probably prefer.
5th Annual AHAP Conference to be held in Las Vegas
I wanted to share with our readers the exciting opportunity to attend the next annual Association for Healthcare Accreditation Professionals (AHAP) Conference, taking place in Las Vegas from May 12 –13, 2011.
We’ve heard first-hand how happy attendees were to connect and network with each other—both veterans and rookies said they greatly benefit from the connections they’ve made at this conference.
The agenda has been posted with some timely sessions that will cover Joint Commission and CMS regulatory changes in 2011, improving compliance with core measures, tips for data management, and plenty more.
For more information, including the full agenda, learning objectives, speaker list, continuing education information, hotel, and pricing, visit the AHAP website.
NEJM article reviews criteria for quality process measures
As you collect data on process measures to avoid financial penalties, achieve accreditation, and prepare for value-based purchasing, you might want to consider a recent article in the August 12th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Mark Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, Jerod Loeb, PhD, and Stephen Schmaltz, PhD, all of the Joint Commission, along with Robert Wachter, MD, came together to write an opinion (as individuals, not as representatives of The Joint Commission) on the current state of core measures. They conclude that currently, not all measures live up to criteria the authors are proposing are necessary to be effective in enhancing patient safety and quality. Though it’s far too early to tell if the measures that fall short of the criteria—such as measures concerning discharge instructions for heart failure patients—will, in the future, actually cease to be a requirement, the article is an interesting read on how leaders might assess and approve measures in the future. The authors propose that measures:
- Have a strong, proven evidence base
- Accurately measure whether the care process involved has actually been implemented
- Is not so far “up stream” in the care process that failure to provide other, more “down stream” care processes would change the effectiveness of the measure
- Has a low chance of creating an adverse event
AHRQ updates State Snapshots with 2009 information
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has updated its State Snapshots with data from 2009. The State Snapshots break down healthcare quality information by state to help both the public and private sectors understand disparities among states. The latest update includes new data on health insurance.
The data to create the snapshots comes from the 2009 National Healthcare Quality Report. This year states can compare how their care for certain types of insured patients compares with the rest of the nation, or other states. As in previous years, the Snapshots show that all states have a mix of measures on which they perform well and on which they perform poorly.
To find the State Snapshots and check out your own individual state, click here. Readers, have you ever utilized this tool to get a better idea of where your state ranks in terms of quality? How have you used it?
AHRQ releases software to help hospitals analyze and publicize quality data
Last Friday the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced it had created a new data analysis software tool for hospitals to use. The Windows-based tool, called MONAHRQ (My Own Network, Powered by the AHRQ) will help facilities better aggregate, analyze, and display quality data–and it’s all free! The tool also allows users to create Web sites that display the data for internal benchmarking use or to showcase quality of care statistics to the public.
Hospitals that are already using many of the AHRQ’s quality indicators, reporting template, and more, can easily use that data to plug into the MONAHRQ software tool. Additionally, the AHRQ has said that the data that can be captured by MONAHRQ goes beyond that of the Hospital Compare tool with some of the information available, such as hospital-specific data on patient safety events and deaths, as well as preventable rehospitalizations.
I’m hoping to find out more about this tool in the coming weeks, but it sounds like an exciting development, especially for hospitals that do not otherwise have the resources to create an informational website like this for their community to view.
AHRQ releases guides to help providers design public reports about quality data/outcomes
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published a series of three guides to teach best practices to those staff people at hospitals in charge of putting together reports for the public. The guides are meant to help users discover how to deliver clear information about hospital quality and performance to the public, which is often unfamiliar with healthcare terminology.
Specifically, the three reports are about the following:
- Report 1, titled,How To Effectively Present Health Care Performance Data To Consumers, focuses on the presentation of comparative healthcare performance data.
- Report 2, titled Maximizing Consumer Understanding of Public Comparative Quality Reports: Effective Use of Explanatory Information, focuses on the background information contained in public reports that frames the decision question, provides a context for using the information, and details the specifics of the data.
- Report 3, titled How To Maximize Public Awareness and Use of Comparative Quality Reports Through Effective Promotion and Dissemination Strategies, focuses on the promotion and dissemination of reports.
You can find access to these AHRQ reports by clicking here.
Do you think that this type of information is useful for you, or someone else at your facility? Is this information that whoever is in charge of putting these type of reports together at your hospital is already aware of? Usually the AHRQ releases these types of reports because there is a need for them in the field, so it’s likely that if your hospital has this down pat, you’re ahead of the curve.
Just the facts: Women account for 6 out of 10 hospital stays
I was paging through the HCUP Facts and Figures Report (most recent data is from 2007) and thought just highlighting the differences in male and female hospital discharges would be interesting to look at on the blog. First of all, 60% of all discharges are of female patients, about 23.2 million hospital stays. This is because more than one-fifth of female hospital stays are related to pregnancy and childbirth. Males accounted for 16 million hospital stays in total.
When examining stays related specific conditions, it’s not surprising to find that the five of the top 10 diagnoses for males and females were related to heart conditions. These include coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, cardiac dysrhythmias (irregular heart beat) and non-specific chest pain. Of these, males were discharged more often for coronary artery disease and acute myocardial infarction (62.4% and 59.6% respectively, vs. females). Females had a slight edge on the other conditions, but they were almost even between males and females.
Other conditions that made the top 10 for hospital stays in 2007 (for males and females):
- pneumonia
- mood disorders
- septicemia
The three reasons for hospital stays for males and females that grew the most between 1997 and 2007 were skin and subcutaneous tissue infection, osteoarthritis, and septicemia (blood infection).
To find the full list of facts, see the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Facts and Figures report for 2007.
Data management virtual workshop
HCPro is offering a great opportunity to help you learn how to better collect, analyze and use your data to make more sound performance improvement decisions. Managing Your Data: Virtual Workshop Series features Greeley Consultant Ken Rohde who will spend time going over how to put the multitudes of data that your organizations collect to work for you. Your facility will get the chance to learn from Ken in a conference-style setting without having to travel!
The first virtual conference, Managing Your Data: Methods for Understanding and Collecting, is coming up next week on June 4. This first installment will help attendees better understand how to better use your time to collect valuable data, and not waste energy on data that will not provide positive change for your organization.
The other installments, on July 9 and July 30, talk about tools for analysis and best practices for presentation of data. You can purchase each installment separately but you do receive a substantial discount for purchasing the entire virtual workshop ($597 in total, vs $259 individually).
I hope you consider this great opportunity for learning better how to use your data effectively and improve your patient safety processes.
