The Quality Quarterly
The Quality Quarterly
HQI produces a quarterly newsletter intended to support health care quality and patient safety professionals’ work by providing information on clinical developments, opportunities to learn from your peers, and new technologies to help you work more effectively. The newsletter is distributed in March, June, September, and December. To subscribe, please email info@hqinstitute.org.
Knock Out the Flu Video Encourages Everyone to Get a Flu Shot
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.
Newly Developed Signal Detection Systems Benefit HQI and CHPSO Members
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.
Quality Transparency Dashboard Uptake Increases
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.
Hospital Quality Improvement Platform Enrollment Continues To Grow
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Use of HQI’s new Hospital Quality Improvement Platform — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform — has increased since the last quarter. The platform is free to all California Hospital Association (CHA) members.
There’s Still Time to Join HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health Learning Community
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.
HQI Launches Web Page to Help Address Health Care Disparities
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.
Updated Quality Transparency Dashboards Released for Third Quarter of 2020
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:
Hospital-Level Relationships Between Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 and COVID-19 Hospitalization Rates
Following up on our previous work on County-Level Relationships Between Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 and Deaths, we applied similar methods to hospital-level data to explore the relationship between the prevalence of several hospital-level risk factors for severe COVID-19 and corresponding COVID-19 hospitalization rates at those hospitals. We used historical hospital inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery discharge records for California hospitals to estimate the patient population prevalence of several potential risk factors for developing severe COVID-19. In addition to the risk factors included in the prior analysis, we also included race/ethnicity in these analyses, though patient gender was excluded.
Perinatal Mental Health Learning Community Program Update
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.
Lessons Learned – Sepsis and Covid-19
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.
HQI President’s Message
“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.
Enrollment Continues for New HQI Data Analytics Platform
Set up your demo now
Enrollment continues for HQI’s new Hospital Quality Improvement Platform — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform. The platform is free to all California Hospital Association (CHA) members.
Since launching in October 2019, 229 acute care hospitals have seen a demo of the platform. Of those, 46 have executed agreements and 143 have participation agreements under legal review to join.
CHPSO, HQI Launch Series of Webinars on Suicide Prevention
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.
Ask CHPSO: Null Fields – Data Quality
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.
Ask CHPSO: Null Fields – Improving the Quality of Patient Safety Event Reporting Data
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.
County-Level Relationships Between Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 and Deaths
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.
Medication Reconciliation Optimization: Cleaning Up the wRECk
Sarah A. Bajorek, PharmD, BCACP
Mithu Molla, MD, MBA
UC Davis Health
COVID-19 Causes Virtual Care to Skyrocket at Dignity Health Medical Group
Dr. Christine Braid
Bita Farhadpour, MBA
Dignity Health Medical Group
Updated Quality Transparency Dashboards Paused Until 3rd Quarter of 2020
Due to increased hospital workload and delays in data reporting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, HQI is delaying the release of updated Quality Transparency Dashboards until the third quarter of 2020.
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:
Coming Soon: New Reports to Hospital Quality Improvement Platform
The Hospital Quality Improvement Platform
has several new reports that will soon be
available.
Those reports include: