Catholic Health East: Latest News

CHE officials were pleased to announce that, thanks to the collective efforts of member health organizations over the past eighteen months; Catholic Health East has achieved and exceeded its patient safety goals for 2006.

Pictured (left to right): Sharon Duffy, manager, External Standards at CHE; Diane Denny, CHE's vice president of Quality and Patient Safety; Janet Corrigan, PhD, MBA, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum; April Taylor, CHE Quality Coordinator; Tom Garthwaite, MD, CHE's executive vice president and Chief Medical Officer; and Win Whitcomb, MD, director, CHE Hospitalist Services.

CHE has participated in a leadership role in the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a nationwide effort launched and championed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Initiated in January 2005, the goal of the campaign nationally was to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals that lead to an estimated 100,000 lives lost each year. Over 3,000 hospitals, representing 75% of the nation's hospital beds and 80% of all admissions, joined the effort.

All CHE RHCs and JOAs have participated in this nationwide campaign; each facility selected one, some, or all six interventions identified as having the most impact on patient safety. These six interventions are: deploying Rapid Response teams; improving care for acute myocardial infarction; preventing adverse drug events; reducing surgical site infections; preventing central line infections; and preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia.

As a System, CHE approached the campaign as an opportunity for collaboration, holding learning sessions and action periods over the course of the past year. At CHE's June Patient Safety Collaborative learning session held in Philadelphia, Diane Denny, CHE's Vice President of Quality and Patient Safety, shared the exciting news about CHE's team achievement. "The national effort's campaign goal was to save an additional two lives per one thousand patients through the implementation and adherence to several patient safety initiatives," said Denny. "CHE statistics show that, since the inception of this effort, our hospitals have succeeded in saving an additional four lives per thousand patients. Our results are not typical of the experience across the country. CHE facilities embraced the challenge to make needless harm preventable, and coupled it with will, good ideas for change, and a solid execution strategy."

"This is an outstanding accomplishment. I'm proud of the collective efforts of our team members," said Tom Garthwaite, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Catholic Health East. "The challenge to all of us is to assure that all six of these proven interventions are consistently and permanently in place throughout our health ministry. In building an infrastructure of people and practice around our Patient Safety Clinical Collaboratives including the 100,000 Lives Campaign, we are increasingly ready to sustain and expand our improvement efforts system-wide. We look forward to working with our quality leaders and champions throughout CHE to demonstrate industry leading performance in the areas of quality and patient safety."

Acknowledging the efforts of Catholic Health East and other providers throughout the nation, Janet Corrigan, PhD, MBA, the National Quality Forum's president and CEO, was the featured guest speaker at the Collaborative meeting. The National Quality Forum is the nation's standard setter for health care performance measurement. Dr. Corrigan was the principal author of To Err is Human, the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine study asserting that nearly 100,000 patients died in our nation's hospitals each year due to medical error, spoke on "The Case for Quality and Safety—A National Imperative."

Catholic Health East is a multi-institutional Catholic health system, which is co-sponsored by 13 religious congregations and Hope Ministries, a Public Juridic Person within Catholic Health East. Based in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, the System provides the means to ensure the continuation of the Catholic identity and operational strength of the Sponsors' health ministries, which are located within 11 eastern states from Maine to Florida.

The System includes acute care hospitals, free-standing and hospital-based skilled nursing facilities, residential facilities, free-standing behavioral health and rehabilitation facilities, and numerous ambulatory and community based health services. Catholic Health East facilities employ approximately 43,000 full time employees as partners in ministry.