Why Quality Sites Matter

Hospitals have many reasons for implementing quality sites to display their quality measures. The top reported reasons are to:

• Increase transparency
• Educate consumers
• Motivate staff
• Lead rather than follow with quality reporting
• Improve hospital performance and patient satisfaction

Work with us, and we'll bring our experience designing and building quality data reporting websites, along our understanding of healthcare quality improvement initiatives, and we'll create a quality site for your hospital that will help you stand out as a leader in reporting and transparency. 

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Primary PCI within 90 minutes of hospital arrival

This measure is reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to help consumers evaluate hospital performance as it relates to heart attack care. It is measuring the percentage of heart attack patients (acute myocardial infarction or AMI) who receive primary PCI within the first 90 minutes after arriving at our hospital and testing positive for signs of a heart attack.

PCI is short for percutaneous coronary intervention, which is a surgical procedure to open blocked blood vessels in the heart. There are a few PCI procedures surgeons use to open blocked vessels, including angioplasty, stenting, and artherectomy.

What does it mean and why is it important?

With any heart attack treatment, time is important. During a heart attack, the heart does not get enough oxygen and cannot pump blood as it should. The longer this continues, the more heart muscle is damaged or dies. The sooner the life-saving treatments are started, the better the chance of survival is.

Treatment for a heart attack involves procedures and medications that open the blood vessels and make the blood flow more easily through the heart. PCI is one of a number of treatments for a heart attack. Others are medications (for example, “clot busters”, blood thinners, beta blockers, and cholesterol-lowering medications) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), which is commonly known as heart bypass surgery.

Medical studies have shown that PCI performed within 90 minutes can increase a patient’s chance of surviving a heart attack and having a better quality of life afterward. The sooner PCI is performed, the more effective it is, which is why the 90 minute time frame is important.

How are we doing?

Our most recent score is 93%, which means that 93 percent of heart attack patients received primary PCI within 90 minutes after arriving at our hospital. The target score is 98%. The threshold, or acceptable score, is between 93% and 97%. Any score below 93% is considered below threshold. Exceptional performance is 100%. This means that our score for the most recent evaluation period is at the low end of the threshold range.

What are we doing to improve our performance?

We make it a goal to continually improve our performance, our patient outcomes, and our care delivery. We do not currently have quality improvement programs in place to improve upon this measure specifically, but we are always striving to provide the best possible care.

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Nurse Communication

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created a patient survey to gather information about hospital care from the patient's perspective. The survey asks patients to rate their hospital stay based upon things like doctor and nurse communication, pain control, room cleanliness, and more. This survey is called Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS). It is a national, standardized survey of hospital patients. The HCAHPS survey is sent to a random sampling of patients who have been recently discharged from the hospital, asking them to rate their hospital experience.

The results of the survey are collected and posted on the CMS's Hospital Compare site where consumers can view the data about patient satisfaction and easily see how one hospital compares to any other in the country. State and national benchmarks are also provided to consumers so they have a better understanding of how hospitals in general perform in relation to the average hospital.

What is it measuring?

This measure compiles answers to three separate questions that relate to nurse communication:

• “During this hospital stay, how often did nurses treat you with courtesy and respect?”
• “During this hospital stay, how often did nurses listen carefully to you?”
• “During this hospital stay, how often did nurses explain things in a way you could understand?”

The possible responses are Always, Usually, Sometimes, and Never. The measure reflects the percentage of surveyed patients who answered Always to all three questions.

What does it mean and why is it important?

Good communication between healthcare providers and patients (and their families) is important to a successful overall healthcare experience. When nurses and patients communicate well, the risk of medication or treatment errors is reduced, and it helps patients feel like a part of their care team, which can also lead to improved outcomes. A higher score may indicate that a hospital provides a higher level of patient care.

How are we doing?

When compared to national and state benchmarks, our latest performance was worse than average.

What are we doing to improve?

We have a number of hospital-wide initiatives that relate to nurse/patient communication. Open communication between hospital staff, including nurses, and patients and their family is a goal we always strive to reach. We encourage our patients and their family to let us know if communication is lacking.

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Quality Measures

The content to help support your quality data and graphs can be customized for you, or you can choose to license our pre-written content.

Our measure content is designed to answer four basic questions:

• What is the measure?
• What does it mean and why is it important?
• How are we doing?
• What are we doing to improve?

If you choose to license our content for your measures, you will be free to alter the content at will for as long as you are licensed, or you can have us customize it for you.

We have measure content for every publicly reported measure from agencies like CMS & HCAHPS, AHRQ, TJC, and NCDB. You can choose to display any combination of those measures on your site, and you may also add your own internal measures to your quality site.

Sample Measures

Below are links to some sample measures. They include content and graphs that are automatically updated when new data is published. If you would like to see examples not listed here, just get in touch and we'll provide you with those samples as well. We can also provide your hospital with a quality site demo within your own website framework so you can see how it would look embedded in your own site. For access to a demo, contact us today.

• Measure 1 - Primary PCI Within 90 Minutes of Hospital Arrival (AMI-8) (CMS process measure)
• Measure 2 - Nurse Communication (HCAHPS patient satisfaction measure)
• Measure 3 - Prophylactic Antibiotic Received Within One Hour (CMS process measure)
  
  

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877.788.4427