The Quality Quarterly

With the recent resurgence of COVID-19 and hospitals stretched to capacity, it’s more important than ever to be diligent about infection prevention. While so much more is known now about the disease than it was nine months ago, one thing that we have known since the start is how to minimize the spread of COVID-19.  

Now, more than ever, we must do what we can to limit the spread of COVID-19 locally and throughout the state.

HQI added two team members to its roster in October. In her role as a data analyst for HQI, Candice Cam will manage the data intake, system integrity, and performance enhancement of the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform. Specifically, she’ll be working to help our hospitals ingest discharge records into the platform so they have timelier analytics, ensure that the analytics presented are correctly calculated, and work with our vendor to create new reports and make improvements to the platform.  

In November, HQI was pleased to welcome Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard (Retired) to a webinar on Critical Leadership Situations: Dealing with the Added Pressures of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  

Our partners at the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority have produced a short video — Knock Out the Flu — that explains why everyone should get the flu shot every year, and why it’s more important now than ever to help protect you and your loved ones. It’s a helpful resource to share with your patients and community. 

Every quarter, HQI receives a large volume of discharge records (as part of the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform) and safety reports (as part of the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization, or CHPSO) from hospitals.  

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

HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community provides California hospitals with education, technical assistance, and peer support to address perinatal mental health disorders — the most common complication of childbirth. The program assists hospitals in complying with Assembly Bill 3032, the maternal mental health conditions law, which requires hospitals to educate perinatal employees, patients, and families about maternal mental health conditions, post-hospital treatment options, and resources.   

Health care disparities, defined as variation in quality and safety of care by patient sociodemographic characteristics, have been a significant and persistent problem in American health care. While California hospitals are often at the forefront of the quest to achieve equitable health care, significant work remains. 

To assist hospitals with uncovering, understanding, and alleviating disparities, HQI has launched a new web page — Hospital Strategies for Combating Health Care Disparities.

Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders continue to be the most common complication of childbirth. HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community seeks to strengthen hospital approaches to perinatal mental health through specially tailored learning and peer-exchange opportunities, which include webinars, group office hours, individual coaching, and online training and educational resources. These are all available to California hospitals free of charge, courtesy of a grant from the California Health Care Foundation. 

One of the most popular educational offerings available to CHPSO members are the regularly scheduled Safe Table forums. Offered about two dozen times per year, these meetings are focused on safety and quality improvement topics, each with a specific clinical focus. As a members-only patient safety activity, these confidential forums occur within each participant’s patient safety evaluation system and provide a safe space in which to explore systematic concerns or issues and share lessons learned.  

“Quality is not an act; it is a habit.” – Aristotle 

As patient safety and quality improvement professionals, you understand those words better than most. The work you do isn’t defined by a sales metric or accomplishment of a task, but rather by incremental improvement — your journey from providing good patient care to great patient care. 

National and global organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization acknowledge that suicide is a significant public health issue that has escalated in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased concerns around suicide due to a variety of issues ranging from social isolation to financial hardship. In order to raise awareness and help promote suicide prevention, the CHPSO and HQI hosted the first in a series of webinars on the topic. 

In our previous newsletter, we discussed CHPSO’s new “No Nulls” initiative to improve data quality and how member organizations can help in the effort. This article will review the data pipeline involved in the process, touch on some of the challenges and successes we’ve observed in the effort so far, and suggest ways we can work together in a two-pronged approach to improve end-to-end data quality.  

This year, as part of the CHPSO annual report we provided feedback on the quality of the data submitted to CHPSO. This is part of a larger effort to improve our ability to develop our signal detection methods and other advanced analytic capacities in the CHPSO database.

More than 190,000 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in California as of June 2020, resulting in over 5,600 deaths. Several potential risk factors for developing severe COVID-19 have been identified, including older age and various underlying medical conditions.