The Quality Quarterly

HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community, funded by the California Health Care Foundation, is continuing to provide vital programming and resources to more than 148 California hospitals, to align with the requirements of Assembly Bill 3032 (Frazier). 

In case you missed it, last month HQI released its second report of findings from the sentinel signal detection system.  

This system automatically detects abnormal changes (i.e., signals) in the incidence of diagnosis codes from hospital discharge records in the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform, as well as term frequencies from the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization safety reports.   

HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the California Hospital Association (CHA), creates and distributes quarterly dashboards of publicly available quality data for each CHA acute care member hospital. These model dashboards currently provide information on eight measures.  

It’s official!  HQI and BETA Healthcare Group have come together to offer California hospitals an unprecedented opportunity to advance patient safety. We have launched HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART®, a comprehensive, multi-year program designed to lead hospitals toward developing a reliable, sustainable culture of patient safety and consistent, empathetic and transparent responses to adverse events.  While this cutting-edge program has already proven successful in BETA-member hospitals, our partnership with BETA now allows HQI to make the program available to the greater hospital community. 

Every year, the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO) provides members with an annual report highlighting patient safety-related activities, analytics, and a review of membership and database status.  

Since states began establishing their vaccine plans late last year, health care workers were seen as a critical population for receiving the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. In parallel, the national vaccine rollout plan established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made it a priority to provide the initial limited doses to health care workers. The aim was to protect not only frontline workers, but also to ensure the safety of their families, the patients they closely interact with, and the community at large

We’re 18+ months into the pandemic, but your staff may feel like it’s March 2020 again. Some of your hospitals may be dealing with a current influx of COVID-19 patients that is straining resources to the max, along with a workforce shortage. But no matter the need, through surge after surge, they’ve been there for their communities.  

HQI is excited to announce a partnership with BETA Healthcare Group to offer California hospitals a proven, comprehensive program that will guide them toward unprecedented progress in patient safety. 

HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community, funded by the California Health Care Foundation, is continuing to provide vital programming and resources to more than 148 California hospitals, aligned with the requirements of Assembly Bill 3032 (Frazier).

It has often been referred to as the “silence of shame.” Mental health conditions, substance use, and workplace events have been documented as contributing antecedents to nurse suicides. When a nurse is at risk for losing or loses his/her license, the psychological impact can be devastating. The experience of isolation, feelings of failure, public humiliation, and the stigma of losing his or her career can result in cascading events, potentially leading to a lethal outcome.

The 2021 wave of ransomware attacks has washed over every major business sector — including health care. Moreover, a Wall Street Journal article dated June 10 pointed out that one group of ransomware criminals is specifically targeting hospitals. This unfortunate reality strongly suggests that everyone in the CHA/HQI community should be working to avoid becoming a ransomware victim. This article will discuss high-priority items for organizations to pursue in that effort and identify some important strategies that sometimes get overlooked. Together, this information will hopefully help bolster your barriers against ransomware. 

Among all the patient safety reports that CHPSO receives from members, about 50% end up classified in the catch-all event type of “Other” rather than in a specific clinical or other meaningful event type category (e.g., healthcare-associated infection, fall, medication error, etc.). Sometimes the reports are categorized into the “Other” category because the facts of the safety event do not fit into one of the existing Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Common Formats specific event type categories. The broad nature of this “Other” category, diversity of events that it contains, and large size relative to the more specific event type categories renders it not particularly useful for identifying emerging patient safety issues or tracking trends over time.

HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the California Hospital Association (CHA), creates and distributes quarterly dashboards of publicly available quality data for each CHA acute care member hospital. These model dashboards currently provide information on eight measures. 

Earlier this month, California reached a milestone that at many times throughout the course of the past year might have seemed unattainable. The state has now “reopened” for business, retiring the color-coded tier system and relaxing social distancing and capacity restrictions. After more than 15 months of numerous public health orders, three surges of cases, countless mask and gown changes along with many sleepless nights, the COVID-19 pandemic has finally given us a little bit of breathing room.  

For the past year, while much of the state has been locked down — working remotely and enjoying perhaps a slower pace of life — it’s been quite the opposite for our front-line health care workers. They stepped up, answered the call, working round the clock to care for patients, both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19.   

HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the California Hospital Association (CHA), creates and distributes quarterly dashboards of publicly available quality data for each CHA acute care member hospital. These model dashboards currently provide information on eight measures.

Assembly Bill 3032, which was signed into law in 2019 and took effect in 2020, has two specific requirements for all California hospitals:  

1. Provide education and information for postpartum women and families about maternal mental health conditions, post-hospital treatment options, and community resources.  
2. Provide education and information for hospital employees regularly assigned to work in the perinatal unit, including, as appropriate, registered nurses and social workers, about maternal mental health conditions.