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By Jim Rattray, Vice President, Southcoast Hospitals Group
Hospital quality has been a hot media topic lately. From MRSA to mortality, the public is demanding that hospitals be more transparent — and accountable — when it comes to their quality.
A growing number of hospitals have started to self report their own quality, becoming the leaders in the movement to be more transparent about quality.
In Massachusetts, hospitals that currently self report quality data include Baystate Health System in Springfield, Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and Southcoast Health System in New Bedford.
The road to self-reporting quality is often a long one, filled with long and sometimes heated discussions over why data should be reported, what data to report, how often to report it and what context to provide to the public.
Here are four key areas to consider:
1. Why Report
The “why” discussion is one of the first — and frankly easiest — to answer. But it can often take the longest.
It is essential to have internal quality champions within the administration and among physicians as you work to get buy-in from the medical staff and your trustees. At most hospitals, quality is reported in many forums and the public reporting of data is a natural extension of that.
The main reason to self-report is because your hospital’s data is already publicly reported. There are numerous Websites that already report your data in a dizzying number of different ways. They range from HealthGrades to Leapfrog Group to insurance Websites to quality data now being posted by many states.
Since your data is already out there, consider the three key advantages to self-reporting:
It’s a chance to tell your own story.
Your data is most likely more current than other sites that usually aggregate older data.
You can guide people in how to use and compare data.
2. What to Report
There are hundreds if not thousands of quality performance measures that any hospital collects and reports both internally to clinicians, committees, administration and trustees as well as externally to government agencies and insurance companies.
But when publicly reporting on your Website, make sure you speak directly to the key target audience — your patients and the general public.
Start with the handful of measures that are widely discussed by patients and the media. Infection and mortality rates are among the most common.
In deciding what measures we reported at Southcoast, we asked our physicians and caregivers what questions they were receiving from patients. We used these Frequently Asked Questions, along with what is discussed in the popular press, to determine which measures to report.
3. How Often to Report
When deciding how often to update your data, consider who will be doing it and what the review process will be like. And remember, consistency is important. Once you make a decision about what to report and how often, stick to it.
4. What Context to Provide
There’s a reason you are deciding to report your own quality data — you have a story to tell.
Look for ways to make the quality measure easy to understand by the general public. This can include charts and graphs, but they are only helpful if they easy to read and as “non-clinical” as possible.
Avoid using medical terminology and jargon, whenever possible, and take the time to explain what benchmarks are, how to read a particular quality measure and why it is important to them. We have found it helpful to explain the steps we are taking to constantly improve in all areas so patients know what to expect when they come to the hospital.
We made a decision to use our site to guide patients on how they can play an active role in making their hospital stay as safe as possible.
And we also provided links to as many of the external sources of data, making it easy for our patients to learn more from other sources. We hope this makes our site a “one-stop shop” where they can come back to see how we’re doing from multiple points of view.
Useful hospital quality Web sites:
· Baystate Health System: http://www.baystatehealth.com/eConsumer/bhs_chan_index.jsp?chId=ba60d393b0a50110VgnVCM1000000f0c19acRCRD
· Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: http://www.bidmc.harvard.edu/thefacts
· Massachusetts General Hospital: http://qualityandsafety.massgeneral.org/
· Mount Auburn Hospital: http://www.mountauburn.caregroup.org/body.cfm?id=214
· Southcoast Health System: http://www.southcoast.org/quality/
Jim Rattray is Vice President of Marketing & Public Affairs for Southcoast Health System in New Bedford, Mass. He is an Evans Houghton Award winner and a member of the NESHCo Board of Directors.
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