CHARLOTTE, N.C.--()--Valley Baptist Medical Center-Harlingen (Texas) was able to meet Joint Commission survey requirements with a Premier healthcare alliance program devoted to helping hospitals improve performance.
“The surveyor was fully aware that we use Premier and what it can do.”
Now more than ever, providing high quality, cost-effective care is essential because of healthcare reform. “In our most recent Joint Commission survey, our physician practice evaluations received high marks,” said Pamela Warner, administrative director, medical staff services at Valley Baptist. “The surveyor was fully aware that we use Premier and what it can do.”
QualityConnect™, Premier’s performance improvement program, integrates quality and safety data to help hospitals make better decisions about harm prevention, including how to reduce hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), while supporting The Joint Commission Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) requirements.
Valley Baptist joined the Premier-CMS Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration™ (HQID) in 2003 and QualityConnect as part of its medical staff reappointment and physician performance evaluation processes.
QualityAdvisor™, a solution in QualityConnect, helps to improve clinical performance and support professional practice evaluation efforts. Valley Baptist uses QualityAdvisor’s Practitioner Profile with integrated core measures data, and distributes its quarterly report to medical staff, to satisfy requirements for both focused and OPPE required by The Joint Commission.
“The wonderful thing is, you can run physician-specific core measures and the Joint Commission really likes that. QualityAdvisor made our survey extremely easy and successful,” Warner continued.
The entire process received superior appraisals from surveyors in December 2008. In a more recent survey of the hospital’s disease-specific certified Stroke Program, the survey team reviewed credentialing, OPPE and related matters and found no problems.
QualityAdvisor combines clinically-proven methods with the nation's largest clinical and financial comparative database of more than 600 facilities to provide timely, actionable information. QualityAdvisor identifies clinical and financial improvement opportunities, highlights drivers of practice variation and monitors adherence to quality of care measures.
Valley Baptist’s Current Competency and Feedback Committee – made up of the administrative director of medical staff services, four physicians and all department chiefs – developed and oversees the OPPE and focused professional practice evaluation process for 595 physicians.
“Physicians have generally accepted the profiles, and within the past year have embraced them,” said Warner. “Within the last two years, medical staff leaders have been using practitioner profiles for quality review and they’ve become interested in the resource utilization comparisons.”
The medical center is shifting to using the profiles to examine resource utilization, and savings are expected. “We are looking more closely at length of stay and cost per case. As a part of our ongoing performance improvement, we are now comparing and addressing outliers. We are drilling down to more detail and that’s where QualityAdvisor is so helpful. It has a great deal of information about conditions – extended length of stay for hospital-acquired infections and excessive readmissions, for example – which hospitals and doctors won’t be reimbursed for in the near future. You can trend all of those things, physician specific, in QualityAdvisor,” said Warner.
Valley Baptist is also using QualityAdvisor as it attacks its readmission rate. The medical center is in one of 14 communities nationwide that CMS has chosen for its Care Transitions Project, seeking to eliminate unnecessary hospital readmissions. The goal is to improve healthcare processes so that patients, caregivers and the entire provider team have what they need to keep patients from returning to the hospital within 30 days of discharge.
QualityAdvisor is now available to hospitals nationwide. The QualityConnect program has helped hospitals save $284 million in the past year, while reducing mortality, readmissions, harm and costs to preserve Medicare margins, and enhance patient outcomes.
About Valley Baptist Medical Center-Harlingen
Valley Baptist Health System is a faith-based regional health system focused on improving the lives of the people it serves by providing high quality healthcare and medical education throughout South Texas. Valley Baptist extends many of its services beyond its facilities and into local communities, offering free screenings for the community, support groups and numerous educational opportunities. The 586-bed Valley Baptist Medical Center-Harlingen serves as a Lead Level III Trauma Center and is designated by the Joint Commission as a Primary Stroke Center, and by the State of Texas as a Primary Level II Stroke Facility. www.ValleyBaptist.net
About the Premier healthcare alliance, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,400 U.S. hospitals and nearly 70,000 other healthcare sites working together to achieve high quality, cost-effective care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier maintains the nation's most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network. A world leader in helping deliver measurable improvements in care, Premier works with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West to improve hospital performance. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Premier also has offices in San Diego, Philadelphia and Washington. http://www.premierinc.com
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Delicious
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Digg
MySpace
Newsvine
Google Bookmark
Yahoo! Bookmark
Email
Email 
