The Quality Quarterly

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. 

The Hospital Quality Improvement Platform has several new reports that will soon be available. 

Those reports include: 

As national leaders in the patient safety arena, HQI and its affiliate, Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO) are continually pursuing efforts to eliminate patient harm. We are always looking for new and innovative methods and partners and viewing patient safety issues through different lenses has always been an HQI/CHPSO attribute. 

In that light, CHPSO has recently entered into a member agreement with Cerner, a health care information technology company. 

The CHPSO 2019 Annual Report was released on May 13, 2020. This report, which covers the period of January 1–December 31, 2020, focuses on CHPSO’s year in review with highlights for 2020. The report is available online on the CHPSO website. 

The ICD-10 codes between Z55 and Z65 are the social determinants of health (SDOH) discharge codes. Social determinants of health include factors like:  

• Socioeconomic status 
• Education 
• Neighborhood and physical environment 
• Employment 
• Social support networks  
• Access to health care  

Addressing social determinants of health is important for improving health and reducing longstanding disparities in health and health care. 

The Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization  (CHPSO) and the Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) celebrated Patient Safety Awareness Week with a series of very well attended and highly informative webinars. Many organizations took advantage of these educational offerings as opportunities to bring multidisciplinary teams together to learn more about these important patient safety and quality improvement topics. If you missed these sessions, we encourage you to take advantage of the recordings and associated materials. Here are recaps of each of the five webinars: