Quality, Patient Safety and Clinical Excellence
St. Joseph's Hospital is passionately committed to providing the highest quality care to the patients we serve. To that end, we focus intensive efforts on continuously monitoring many quality indicators in every clinical department of the hospital - we believe that if we can't measure it, we'll have a difficult time improving it. And we are committed to the open reporting of quality and safety in our hospital, which makes us even more accountable to our patients.
Like most other hospitals in the United States, our quality data is reported to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and publicized through the Hospital Compare website since 2005. St. Joseph’s even started reporting its quality data in 2003 before it was required by CMS.
The Hospital Compare website compares hospitals on quality measures for patients being treated for: Heart attack, Heart failure, Pneumonia & Surgery.
In 2007 CMS and other healthcare partners began preparing a survey to measure patients’ satisfaction with their hospital care. At that point in time there was no national standard for collecting patient satisfaction that would allow for an apples-to-apples comparison between hospitals. HCAHPS was developed as the survey tool and implemented in late 2007.
This new information will provide a nationally standardized look at key aspects of care that are of interest to many patients. HCAHPS includes 27 questions which will be bundled and reported as 10 “composite” scores. They are:
• Communication with doctors
• Communication with nurses
• Responsiveness of hospital staff
• Pain management
• Communication about medicines
• Discharge information
• Cleanliness of the hospital environment
• Quietness of the hospital environment
• Overall rating of the hospital
• Willingness to recommend the hospital
View the following national quality data to see how St. Joseph's Hospital compares with other hospitals across the country:
Patient Safety - Signature Insights
A strong area of focus for St. Joseph's is patient safety. We believe we can add value to the delivery of care by providing nurses, physicians and anyone providing direct patient care, with insights - insights that can tie together the various facets of the patient experience from the many different departments in the hospital and route them where caregivers need them. St. Joseph's Hospital is equipped with a proprietary software product called Signature Insights - a unique system within the healthcare industry. We equip our caregivers with the information they need to ensure quality healthcare is being delivered to every patient that walks through their doors.
And what happens when you put good data in the hands of committed caregivers? After using the Insights engine for only a few months, St. Joseph's already has success stories to tell, such as our 3P program to reduce patient falls.
Process Improvement - Lean Thinking
One of the primary goals of St. Joseph's Hospital is to continuously improve every patient's experience at the hospital. With the data gathered through tools like Insights, caregivers and administrative staff are armed with information to implement improvement. In many cases, negative experiences are caused not by careless people but by faulty systems. St. Joseph's Hospital is using Lean Thinking - as a means to evaluate and improve processes. Developed by the Toyota Manufacturing Company more than 30 years ago, the Lean principles allow people most directly involved in a process to closely evaluate the steps in the process and make improvements almost immediately.
St. Joseph's Hospital is using Lean on a continuous basis as an improvement tool and has already made significant improvements in a couple of areas:
- Patient discharge, to better understand the causes of delays and issues that affect a timely departure from the hospital for our inpatients
- Bedside shift report (so that the nurses and patient share progress on how the patient has done during the previous shift) and relocating often-used supplies to each patient's room (so that our staff reduces the amount of time away from the patient gathering supplies to care for their needs.)
We understand that no one really wants to be a patient in the hospital; however, the time one spends there can be made either more or less compassionate, communicative, responsive, supportive, patient-focused and positive. We have chosen to make it more of all of these, and by doing so to raise the standard of care and customer service in the way we treat our patients.
To see information about what St. Joseph's and other Signature affiliated hospitals are doing in terms of value-added initiatives, see our latest issue of Insights Insider.
