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In a recent press release,
Patients’ rating of the quality of their NHS care will affect hospitals’ and GPs’ funding in England
The rating of quality and other metrics is set to be displayed on huge TV displays streaming dashboards.
Information on service quality is also set to be displayed on “dashboards” in hospitals
Why Dashboards in Hospital TV Displays?
“This is about giving more clout to patients, more say to patients.
“By measuring quality across the service and publishing that information for the first time, both staff and patients can work together to make better informed choices about their care.”
Health Secretary Alan Johnson told the Commons: “We must have an unwavering, unrelenting focus on quality.”
And he said there was an aim to bring “clarity to quality” and streamline the “morass” of existing standards.
The KPIs to assess Quality of care is yet to be decided but similar example in a London A&E displays regularly updated details of how soon patients are seen, assessed and get test results and about patient satisfaction.
Information on the quality of a local hospital or GP practice’s care will also be available on the NHS Choices website, and on clinical “dashboards”.
One example of a Clinical dashboard
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One Comment
ince publication of the IOM’s groundbreaking reports outlining the prevalence of preventable medical errors and the actions that can be taken to significantly reduce them, U.S. healthcare industry leaders have made significant investments in clinical process, technology and organizational infrastructure to improve quality and patient safety. And significant additional investment is anticipated to be required in the foreseeable future. However, in our increasingly challenging reimbursement and economic environment, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to demonstrate adequate ROI to sustain the pace of investment required to truly impact care.
Have you noticed how much everyone wants to find “some way” to measure Quality of Care? And the benefits of Evidence Based Care? And the financial impact of improved Quality? And, have you noticed that the best that people are able to do is bring anecdotal evidence…a few examples…some case studies…some hypotheses about the relationship between clinical process and clinical outcomes? Almost every presenter at the most recent Zynx Health Conference in San Diego brought illustrations of benefits – clinical, operational and financial – yet the resemblance they bore to each other was coincidental, at best.
We believe the reason for this is that the science of Hospital Quality Management is relatively immature. Hospital Financial Management, by contrast, is very mature, as evidenced by things like standard financial statements, consistent charts of accounts, universally accepted metrics and measurements, easy benchmarking, etc. Comparable capabilities are not possible in the current world of Hospital Quality Management – not for lack of demand or desire, but for lack of commonly agreed-upon definitions, metrics, and reporting mechanisms.
My Firm’s point of view is that to truly “move the needle” on quality, an organization must begin by clearly defining and it. While there is no standard healthcare industry definition of what constitutes “quality,” we have found that top healthcare performers adopt a composite of measures that consider:
Clinical Outcomes: Ultimately it is the outcome that matters most. Risk adjusted healthcare quality measures such as inpatient mortality rate, readmission rate, complication rate are commonly accepted indicators of quality outcome success.
Clinical Process: Effective clinical processes are essential to achieving superior healthcare quality outcomes. At a minimum, current publicly reported “core measures” should be considered. Evidence based physician order sets and clinical care plans provide a rich assortment of additional quality process measures.
Patient Experience: An excellent starting point for this would be to use the CMS Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) patient satisfaction measures. These can be supplemented with additional information from your patient satisfaction survey.
Resource Utilization: “Too little” or “too much” care can adversely affect outcomes. Measures such as risk adjusted average length of stay, ICU ALOS, and cost per case are examples of effective resource utilization indicators.
Top performing organizations not only define and measure healthcare quality, they ask the question: “How are we doing?”
We believe that the best way to answer that question is to compare your organization’s results to those of “Top Performers.” There are a number of organizations that provide excellent health care industry clinical quality and financial benchmark information. Through benchmarking, organizations are able to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and develop strategies to address and overcome healthcare quality gaps.
Benchmarked performance ratings on individual measures can then be weighted and rolled up to measure overall quality performance for individual conditions (e.g. pneumonia vs. AMI, individual hospitals within a health delivery system, or a system - wide composite score.
Many Top Performers establish quality performance goals, and compensate their leaders on degree of goal achievement.