Quality Measures Are An Instrument For Evaluating Perceptions

The surveys are meant to be specific and consistent and are not just used to evaluate the organizations for improvement but are also to educate in the best practice standards adopted throughout health care and to help staff in ways to continually improve an organizations performance. For this purpose, in 1996 the Quality Check website was launched to help the Joint Commission provide information regarding the performance of accredited organizations to consumers and organizations. Users are able to search for accredited or certified organizations; they can locate organizations by either type of service or geographical area and lists of certified organizations as well as a hospital’s performance measures can be obtained.

Quality of service should be one of the most important and well monitored goals for any medical facility, from your small town family doctor’s office, to nursing and rehabilitation facilities, all the way to large hospital systems. The quality of service provided in a facility doesn’t just affect the patients. Quality of service also affects the bottom line, or whether or not the hospital system is profitable. In order to better access the system’s current quality of service and to devise improvement plans I would need to explore issues that have significant effect on quality of care such as, patient satisfaction and retention, medical errors

Quality management is essential to the success of the quality improvement of the health care industry. “Management uses management and planning tools to organize the decision making process and create a hierarchy when faced with competing priorities “( Ransom, et al., 2008). Quality measures should have these goals: effective, safe, efficient, patient-centered, equitable, and timely care (Quality Measures, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2011).

In addition, MONAHRQ has established partnerships with different organizations to provide customers with a system that has integrated the highest-quality of care in which ensures communities their required needs. The mission, vision, and values have a big role on hospitals working together with all of their patients to identify the health and well-being of every customer. Washington State hospitals and hospital systems have also mainly focused on their customer evaluation and satisfaction values by respecting patients and their care, which helps them sustain a healthy and safe environment in a community that identifies with every individual patient.

At Fort Madison Community Hospital they are focus at continuing improving quality service and managing care within the facility. To do this they have to measure accurately by different methods of quality improvement strategies. The managers also have to look at information technology applications and use benchmarking, milestones to help manage quality improvement to have a more effective facility.

There are various considerations that may affect hospital scores, it involves satisfaction and eduction in which are a very important aspect of nursing care. As a nurse, it is important to have positive outcomes. There is currently one hospital within a 5-mile radius of my current facility. The two hospitals that are in this comparison are Kingwood Medical Center and Memorial Hermann NE. My place of employment is MHNE. So, when compared to Kingwood Medical Center, Memorial Hermann NE scores slightly better in both categories. Kingwood Medical Center patient satisfaction was 70%, while Memorial Hermann was at 73% with state and the national average of 76% and 73%. Even though my facility MHNE is at the national average, it is still lower than

The purpose of this paper is to explain what the website Hospital Compare is about. The paper will reveal the agencies that are behind the website and it will also give a little insight about how the information is chosen that is available to the public. Also, you will learn about Ohio Valley Medical Centers (OVMC) ratings and some areas of the medical center that could use a bit of improvement. This paper will also include some strategies that OVMC could use to help improve their ratings.

The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC) is an initiative of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2015). NQMC is a website and database for information on evidence-based health care quality measures and measure sets (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2015). “The NQMC mission is to provide practitioners, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining detailed information on quality measures, and to further their dissemination, implementation, and use in order to inform health care decisions” (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2015). There are several measures established in the NQMC that deal with prescribing the correct medications for hospitalized patients.

Assessment of quality of care can occur at one or more levels, from the care provided by an entire health system or plan provided by an individual hospital of health professional.

Survey of patient’s experiences is important source of information of the quality of health care provided by the particular hospital, which allows patients to compare the hospitals in the area. The HCAHPS star rating of Gulf Coast Hospital and Bay Medical Center is two stars, while Sacred Heart Hospital is rated with four stars on the excellence of care. The outliner indicators for Gulf Coast Medical Center in the survey of patients’ experiences on the question: “How often did patients receive help quickly from the hospital staff?” shows that 74% patients pick the answer “always communicated well”, that is slightly lower than national average with 79%. The survey question “How often were the patients’ rooms and bathrooms kept clean” only 61% of the patients pick that their bathroom and room were “always clean” that is much lower than the national average 74% and only 47% of the patients understood the care that was provided when they were

In any continuous quality improvement effort, measurement is the key element (Sollecito, & Johnson, 2013). “Measurement and statistical analysis are used to assess the impact of an improvement effort” (Sollecito & Johnson, 2013). To Measure the impact of the program, the hospital utilized a departmental quality improvement assessment with a scoring matrix for self-assessment (McLaughlin, et. al., 2012). The scoring matrix consisted of five category ratings which each department head had to complete. Univer4sal Charting and Resource Utilization were also used for measurement (McLaughlin, et. al., 2012).

Quality measures are strategies that gauge, evaluate or compute health care processes, results, discernments, patient insight, and administrative structure. In addition, quality measures are frameworks that are connected with the capacity to deliver first-class health care and/or that are able to identify with one or more quality objectives for medicinal services. These objectives include: compelling, protected, effective, quiet focused, impartial, and opportune consideration. Quality measures can be used to measure quality improvement, public reporting, and pay-for-reporting programs specific for health care providers (CMS.gov, 2016). There are an assortment of quality measures in which health care organizations can use to determine the status of the care they are delivering. Many are appropriate, but few are chosen for this research paper. Among them are: National Health Care Surveys, Hospital IQR Programs, Scorecards, and Political, Power, and Perception/Data for Decision-making tools.

Through statistical analysis, there were ten AHRQ inpatient quality indicators that are statistically different from that of the reference population. To determine which ones were significant, the reference population was compared to the risk-adjusted confidence interval. Those whose reference population was outside the risk-adjusted confidence interval were deemed as significantly different. These ten indicators are listed below in Table 1.

These measurements provide feedback of a patient’s experience with the care offered at a given hospital. These measurements assess a wide range of factors including interpersonal aspects of care, clarity of - and ease of access to - information provided by the physician, speed of medical staff’s response to the patient’s urgent care needs, among other factors. These measurements are used by patients in their subjective evaluation during their process of choosing a hospital for emergency care or

Quality indicators enable the health care system to identify inferior care in both process or outcome and structure while enhancing quality improvement in health care (De Vos et. al, 2009, p.1).