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Thanks to the efforts of so many, Catholic Health East has made some incredible strides over the years in improving quality and patient safety system-wide. From the breakthrough successes achieved by our Patient Safety Collaborative and Emergency Department Collaborative…to the alignment of our efforts with the nationwide Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 100,000 Lives and 5 Million Lives campaigns…to the data collected through our patient/resident survey process that provides critically important feedback that guides the improvement process…our RHCs and JOAs can take great pride in their accomplishments. 2008 was an exceptional year for our quality efforts. CHE chose the Joint Commission’s Core Measure Sets as the primary measure to track our progress in improving the quality of our care. In 2008, our goal was to move our performance at least 50% of the way from our 2007 baseline to the 90th percentile level of performance. You should all take pride that we achieved that goal!In addition, all RHCs were working to be in a state of readiness for Joint Commission accreditation visits expected throughout 2009. Achieving compliance with all of the Joint Commission’s Accreditation Standards is an enormous task that involves nearly every person and process in a hospital. While our current efforts are important and necessary, we still have a ways to go to achieve the goals we have established for 2017. “Health care providers are under intense pressure from complex payment incentives that reward procedures highly and undervalue disease prevention and care coordination, says Tom Garthwaite, MD, CHE’s executive vice president and chief medical officer. “Less appreciated by our patients and often by us, they are also relying on the design of the systems within which we work. That design is largely the result of the custom application of our experience and opinions and too frequently rejects what we did not think of first. Further, there is often a rejection of standardization as an affront to professional autonomy.” CHE believes that our future model of care will increase the reliability and coordination of our systems and assure the adherence to evidenced based care. For example, we have implemented systems that use bar code scanning to assure that medications are administered safely and will soon have those systems in all our hospitals. A much broader approach to a fundamental redesign of our clinical care processes will occur under our ACT Initiative. Advancing Clinical Transformation (ACT) is an intensification of an ongoing effort to improve the quality and efficiency of the care we deliver through process redesign and the judicious application of new technologies. We have set breakthrough targets for several key clinical measures of success: zero ventilator associated pneumonias, zero central line associated blood stream infections, zero decubitus ulcers and zero falls with injury. Further, we aim to get patients out of the hospital (decrease length of stay) and keep them out (decreased readmissions within 30 days). These latter two measures are highly dependent on timeliness of interventions and avoidance of complications. Many of the care processes that will be key in meeting our ACT goals have been used successfully in other health care systems. “Our fundamental shift to driving efficiency through clinical redesign has been widely endorsed by our administrative and clinical leadership,” says Garthwaite. “It resonates with our clinicians and should resonate with our patients.” The next couple of years promise to be highly rewarding as we view quality and patient safety in a broader context and as we redesign and transform the care we give. Thank you for all of your ongoing efforts to help CHE be a transforming, healing presence in the communities we serve. Sincerely yours,
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