The Patient Experience Division presented the recently released 2022 Vizient Quality and Accountability Scorecards which are based on the Six Domains of Health Care Quality. The scorecard ranks quality and safety annual performance with comparable hospitals (large, specialized complex care medical centers). Of the six domains, the patient-centered domain has shown consistent improvement over past three years -- the only domain where we’ve seen that kind of performance and has the best ranking of any of the domains this year. Here are examples of the HCAHPS questions used as part of the patient centered domain:
- Medication Communication
- Before giving any new medicine, how often did hospital staff tell you what the medicine was for?
- How often did hospital staff describe possible side effects in a way you could understand?
- Transition of Care
- During this hospital stay, staff took my preferences and those of my family or caregiver into account in deciding what my health care needs would be when I left.
- When I left the hospital, I had a good understanding of the things I was responsible for in managing my health.
Denver Health sees decline in Target Zero adverse events
Denver Health has experienced an encouraging decline in Target Zero adverse events in 2022 compared with the two prior years, almost reaching pre-pandemic levels. Much of the recent success can be attributed to reductions in hospital-acquired infections such as catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), central line associated blood stream infections (CLABSI), and most notably, surgical site infections. For the first time in more than five years, we experienced a full quarter with ZERO publicly-reported surgical site infections! See graph below of the Standardized Infection Ratio which is a ratio of observed to expected surgical site infection cases. For many years, we have consistently performed better than expected, but having ZERO is a first! Congratulations to our peri-operative and infection prevention teams for this success.
