What is the value of a good night’s sleep in your own bed? Hospital readmissions are costly for the health care system and stressful for patients and their families. Currently, nearly one in five Medicare patients discharged from hospitals in Minnesota wind up being readmitted within 30 days. The worst part? Many readmissions are avoidable. A coalition in Minnesota is aiming to help patients spend more nights out of the hospital and avoid potentially preventable readmissions.
The RARE (Reducing Avoidable Readmissions Effectively) Campaign was launched in 2011 to address the...
Better Health Greater Cleveland was recently featured in Family Practice News.
Heightened awareness of growing problems in the medically underserved population—such as fragmented and duplicative care, poor access to care, and a lack of care coordination—helped spark Milwaukee County’s five health care systems to join forces to address these pressing issues.
Sometimes perfect compliance on a quality measure is only as far away as a store-bought shower caddy and a bit of MacGyver ingenuity. That’s how an Erie County Medical Center unit lifted nurse compliance with its IV-tube labeling measure out of the 20 percent to 30 percent range to 100 percent.
At Mercy Health-Anderson Hospital in a suburb of Cincinnati, OH, a new council composed of hospital volunteers, staff, and leadership is helping to improve the experience of patients and their families. Known as the Patient Family Council, many of the volunteers participating on the council were once patients or are family members of former patients. The group meets once a month to discuss how best to achieve goals like making sure patients receive the information they need during the hospital discharge process and reducing the noise levels in the hospital at night. Members of the...
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 16 Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) communities are showing that bringing together the people who give care, get care and pay for care improves quality.
After six years, AF4Q communities have built transformative partnerships, often where none existed before:
- Data on quality, cost and patient experience measures are being collected and publicly reported.
- Practice coaches are deployed in hundreds of primary care practices.
- Hospitals are improving care from the emergency department (ED)...
The AF4Q National TCAB teams convened July 25-27 in San Francisco for their final meeting. Among the 121 attendees were the hospital team participants, the six AF4Q TCAB Regional Clinical Leaders, as well as AF4Q alliance representatives from 11 communities. Each hospital team completed a “graduation” video that highlighted their successes and the impact the program had on their units. Speakers also included the Foundation’s Anne Weiss; Sue Hassmiller, RWJF senior advisor for nursing; Joyce Batcheller of Seton Family of Hospitals, along with three staff nurse...
As part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s signature effort to improve the quality of health care 150 hospital teams participated in prestigious national program over the last 18 months.
Ninety percent of the hospital teams participating in this AF4Q hospital quality improvement collaborative improved the quality of care for their patients in measurable ways, resulting in hundreds of avoided readmissions; improved patient safety; standardized data collection on patients’ race, ethnicity and language preference (R/E/L), a critical part of tracking and meeting...
At Southern Maine Medical Center (SMMC), a time savings of 15 to 17 minutes every shift means more quality time for patients. “Huddles,” a mechanism for communicating critical information about patient care needs, once lasted approximately 22 minutes on the SMMC TCAB unit. After the TCAB team implemented an innovation designed to address this, huddle times have decreased to five to seven minutes. The nursing staff accomplished this decrease by providing staff a standardized format for what information should be relayed and the emphasizing the importance of staying on topic...
Sinai-Grace Hospital TCAB Team focused on the patient discharge process to improve HCAHPS scores and lower the cost associated with items patient leave at the hospital. Often hospitals must spend a great deal of time searching for belongings patients leave behind and sometimes are responsible for replacing items such as dentures and glasses. The TCAB team took a unique approach in tailoring a popular and well-vetted innovation, the “four-eyed assessment,” and applying it to discharge. For each discharge, two staff members—thus four eyes—visit the patient to ensure...