The Quality Quarterly

Hospital Quality Institute is committed to providing timely, accurate information and data displays for hospitals to continually improve care. The Data Scientist will collaborate to design, construct, and maintain systems of sentinel signal detection, data acquisition, analytics, and timely feedback to support hospital safety and quality improvement activities to improve care.

Over the past several decades, the United States has experienced a rising crisis in substance abuse. This is illustrated most dramatically by the rise in deaths from drug overdose.  

Ensuring and improving patient safety has always been of the utmost importance for hospitals.

It has been an unprecedented and taxing two years for front-line workers and patients alike.  Nearly one of three patients delayed in-person health care visits in 2020 due to access issues and/or fear of exposure to COVID-19. According to a national poll, 57% of Americans experienced negative health repercussions, including and up to premature death.

HQI has established a vanguard new partnership with Inland Empire Health Plan (IEHP) to advance patient safety and caring for caregivers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Use of HQI’s Hospital Quality Improvement Platform (HQIP) — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform — continues to increase as more hospitals complete their contract reviews.  

Over the past several decades, the United States has experienced a rising crisis in substance abuse. This is illustrated most dramatically by the rise in deaths from drug overdose.  

HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the 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.  

The five outcome measures are:   

Sentinel signal detection systems automatically detect abnormal changes (i.e., signals) in the incidence of diagnosis codes from hospital discharge records in the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform (HQIP), as well as term frequencies from the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO) safety reports.  

The top alerts for HQIP (December 2020-June 2021) and CHPSO (January-May 2021) are: 

HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community is coming to a close at the end of this month. In the final monthly webinar, Kevin Gruenberg, PsyD, helped participants understand how perinatal mental health pertains to fathers as well as mothers.  

Racial health disparities have been a major focus in health care in recent years. Growing research illustrates the negative impact implicit bias has on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States.  

HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART® is more than another hospital quality program.

Several health care organizations have asked why they should join CHPSO instead of another federally listed patient safety organization. 

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.