The Quality Quarterly

Quality and patient safety positions at your organization can be listed on the CHPSO Job Board. If you are a member of CHPSO, the California Hospital Association, or a key partner of the Hospital Quality Institute and would like to list your opportunities on this page, please contact info@chpso.org.

The following guidelines apply:

• Opportunity must be health care-related
• Organization must be a partner of CHPSO, HQI, or CHA
• Each organization is limited to three opportunities at a time
• Postings automatically expire after 30 days
• Contact us to remove a posting, or to repost a position after it expires

Opportunities at CHPSO and the Hospital Quality Institute will also be listed on the job board as well. If there are no current openings listed, feel free to share your resume or CV with us at info@chpso.org, and we will keep it on file.

The 8th Annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit is co-convened with the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), and the European Society of Anesthesiology (ESA). This event will bring together all stakeholder groups to discuss novel solutions to the leading challenges facing hospitals today.

The summit will feature:

• Keynote addresses from public figures and patient safety experts
• Plenary sessions with healthcare luminaries and patient advocates
• Announcements from organizations who have made their own commitments to reach the Patient Safety Movement Foundation’s goal of ZERO preventable deaths by 2020.

Date & Time

Mach 5 – 7, 2020. Click here for the agenda.

Registration

Click here to register. HQI member hospitals will receive 10% off. Contact Hailey Golden to receive the discount code.

Location

The 2020 Summit will be held at the stunning Waterfront Beach Resort, a Hilton Hotel, situated across the street from one of California’s finest coastal spots, Huntington Beach. All Summit events will take place on the property.

More Information

Click here for more information. 

HQI received 33 applications for 2019 C. Duane Dauner Quality Award.  Through a careful review via an external panel of judges, three applicant organizations were recognized:

Santa Clara Valley Medical Center was the winner of 2019 C. Duane Dauner Quality Award, with a program to improve safety and care of patients upon discharge by actively supporting their follow-up care in the community.  Since 2018, their Post-Acute Care Transitions (PACT) initiative reduced the hospital length of stay for non-acute patients by approximately 50% (from 70 days to 35 days), increased hospital bed capacity by over 5,000 hospital bed days, and reduced the 30-day readmission rate for patients in the PACT program from 19% to 5.5%.

Keck Medicine of USC was a 2019 C. Duane Dauner Quality Award finalist with their program to implement Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), positively impacting postoperative pain, opioid use, length of stay, and readmission rates.

John Muir Health was a 2019 C. Duane Dauner Quality Award finalist with a new predictive analytics approach to identify and manage sepsis patients, which resulted in reducing code blues by 35% and saving 54 lives.

More information about the winner and two finalists is available on HQI website.

More than 350 health care professionals gathered at the 2019 Hospital Quality Institute (HQI) Annual Conference in Sacramento Oct. 14 and 15 to discuss the successes that have positioned California as the quality improvement leader and the challenges remaining to advance patient safety.

The conference featured 20 speakers from across the country, an opening day of keynote addresses, and a half day with nine breakouts that took a deep dive into some of the most pressing patient safety issues facing California hospitals. Also featured were 28 poster sessions highlighting best practices in quality improvement and patient safety across California.

The HQI Annual Conference is also home to the C. Duane Dauner Quality Awards, which recognize outstanding achievement in the area of patient safety, quality improvement and experience. This year’s winner is the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC). The winning entry was entitled “Making an Impact with Post-Acute Care Transitions (PACT).” PACT embraces patient-centered care, looking beyond hospital stays and discharge to meet the ongoing needs of patients affected by homelessness, substance use disorders, and other mental health conditions.

Also recognized during the HQI conference were two C. Duane Dauner Award finalists. Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California was honored for their entry “Surgical Care and Recovery: Impacting Postoperative Pain and the Opioid Crisis.” John Muir Health was recognized for their entry “Sepsis Management for the 21^st Century: Clinicians and Technology.”

HQI recognizes traveling to events can be time-consuming and costly, so next year will represent an exciting evolution for our annual conference. In 2020, our annual conference will be held twice — in both Northern and Southern California locations. The new event format will be one-day long with multiple breakout sessions and wow-factor keynotes to open and close the event. If you are coming in the night before, plan to join us for a welcome reception and to honor C. Duane Dauner Award recipients. Dates will be announced soon for this fall conference.

CHPSO was established by the California Hospital Association (CHA) in 2009. The longest-listed patient safety organization (PSO) in the United States, CHPSO is also one of the largest — it began in California, and over the years added members in Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. In the last quarter of 2019 and into early 2020, CHPSO will see a major expansion to a total of 19 states and nearly 550 members. The vast majority of CHPSO facilities are acute care facilities, but CHPSO members also include ambulatory clinics, home health agencies, hospice care providers, and specialty hospitals.

As CHPSO membership grows, so will the CHPSO database. CHPSO currently has nearly 2.5 million safety event reports that it utilizes to provide feedback to members via safe tables, newsletter articles, alerts, custom research, and periodic reports. We anticipate that 2020 will bring one of the biggest single-year increases in the number of event reports that CHPSO receives. The chart below outlines increases in reported events over the past year. 

With the vast number of potential members, new members, and current members with renewed interest in PSO participation, CHPSO has seen a significant increase in the number of organizations seeking out education and support regarding PSOs, the value PSOs provide, and how to go about adapting their patient safety-related activities to maximize the value of PSO participation. To meet these educational needs and ensure health care providers are knowledgeable about PSO participation, CHPSO will continue to offer free educational webinars on a variety of topics. For a list of upcoming events as well as archived webinars, visit www.chpso.org/upcoming-events. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Contact us to request new content.

Each year, CHPSO provides members with an update of the safety event reports submitted to the CHPSO database. Under a federal law, CHPSO provides a protection to hospitals by collecting safety event data. In turn, CHPSO analyzes these data from member organizations and provides specific feedback to hospitals and shares general, de-identified information with the health care community. To be included in this year’s analysis, events must be submitted by Jan. 31. For a list of members, visit the CHPSO website. 

With questions or for more information, contact info@chpso.org.

In the coming year, HQI will continue to provide member support on pressing patient safety issues, including a particular focus on three main areas:

Data Enrichment

Vast amounts of data are available through hospital submissions (from California and, soon, 19 other states) and state systems. Both CHPSO and HQI are uniquely positioned to engage in a predictive analytics initiative that will be able to detect “signals” in patient safety and quality improvement trends. These trends will then be disseminated to member facilities so they may take necessary action and reverse any adverse effects.

Joy and Meaning

Health care employees are faced with ever-increasing pressures and stresses, leading to unprecedented levels of burnout. The results are increased turnover, low employee satisfaction, and significantly increased possibilities for patient harm. HQI will embark on an initiative to improve communication, support staff involved in stressful events, and foster a Just Culture that supports the principles of high reliability. Expected outcomes include:

• Increased incident reporting
• Lower turnover rates
• Improved employee satisfaction rates
• Greater employee satisfaction
• Decreased costs
• An improved overall patient safety environment

Opioid / Methamphetamine Crisis

HQI is exploring partnership opportunities to combat the current crisis. Offering our extensive data resources and ability to convene more than 400 member organizations, HQI will engage in a yet-to-be determined initiative to tackle this national and state emergency.