DeKalb Medical at Hillandale along with Emory Midtown and WellStar Atlanta Medical were listed for getting a patient safety grade of “D”. The Leapfrog Group is an organization that was created to strongly encourage hospitals to aggressively address patient safety and quality by exposing some of the realities in our industry.
Over the years, other organizations have joined them pushing for awareness and transparency around a variety of indicators that affect safety and quality. The movement has been a positive one for patients, and we at DeKalb Medical fully embrace quality improvement and work every day to make sure that we are healing, not harming our patients.
Organizations such as the Leapfrog Group are trying to provide the public with a simple easy way for consumers to assess a hospital’s quality and record of patient safety so they can make informed decisions when choosing a hospital. That’s a reasonable expectation, but a difficult task. To do this, they take multiple sets of data and apply a methodology they’ve developed to produce a single patient safety score or grade. Factors such as hospital acquired infection rates, patient experience data, use and quality of implementation of best practices such as ICU specialists and computerized physician order entry, and clinical outcomes data are included in the calculation. Some information, such as a patient’s socioeconomic status, education level and lifestyle habits are not factored into the assessment.
DeKalb Medical is Confident We Can Improve
We can improve the C at North Decatur and the D at Hillandale. One of the areas CEO Bob Wilson suggest that we can continue to improve upon is HAIs. For three months, we have had no hospital acquired infections at Hillandale and this is a testament to the staff’s work to prevent them. Quality and patient safety takes diligence and attention to detail every day. It also takes structure and focused planning, which DeKalb Medical does through our tactical teams.
Ellen Hargett, director of our Quality Institute, describes it this way “Leapfrog Group provides a good framework for measuring patient safety. Unfortunately, there are measures we improve and control right now, and measures we can’t. We are doing everything within our power and resource availability to improve the measures we control. We are not focusing on the past, we’re focusing on today and tomorrow. The tactical teams approach we use shows results. For instance, dramatic reduction of catheter-associated urinary tract infections has occurred because of the combined efforts of physicians and staff.”
As individuals, we need to embrace the fact that we all play a part in patient safety and that what we do or don’t do will affect our ratings in the future. Washing your hands, making sure communication with your patients is clear, following proper processes to make sure patients don’t fall are tangible things that affect our results. What we are doing now will show up in these grades in 18 months.
If you have any questions, please contact Ellen or Bob [insert contact information].
