Asking patients their race, ethnicity, and language preferences can feel awkward for busy hospital registration staff, but Cincinnati-area hospitals have found that asking these questions reveals important information that can help them to more effectively identify and address potential disparities in the care they deliver.
Today more than one-third of Americans are racial or ethnic minorities, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the proportion will increase to more than half of the U.S. population by 2043. This shift in national demographics will have a tremendous impact...
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...
To increase physician usew and documentation of interpreter services, St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, WI, added a physician Best Practice Alert into Epic, the electronic medical record system the hospital uses, to highlight the need for an interpreter, inform physicians of how to access an interpreter, and inform physicians of a newly created space in Epic that allows them to document interpreter services easily. The Best Practice Alert is automatically triggered at registration for any patient who states a preference for receiving health care in a language other than English....
To ensure that patients who need medical interpreter services are served as quickly as possible, Steward St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, part of the Boston AF4Q alliance, has replaced beeper dispatching with an innovative use of hand-held technology. Staff medical interpreters now carry iPod Touch devices which alert them each time new requests for language services are made. The interpreters take cases from a digital queue while the intranet-net based dispatching system tracks their work flow in real time. Requests are sent only to the appropriate interpreters – for example,...
In March 2011, Tufts Medical Center, a member of the AF4Q initiative in Greater Boston, added a new field to the patient registration screen to record the patient’s preferred written language for health care information. All registration and admitting staff have been trained in collecting this new field and will begin asking patients on April 4, 2011. Since patients do not always speak and read the same language, Tufts Medical Center added this question to better meet their patients language needs—as it is often the simple steps that make a huge difference in providing quality...
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Ashland Community Hospital in Oregon, part of the AF4Q Hospital Quality Network Improving Language Services program, improved rates for screening preferred spoken language and preferred written language from 1.4% to 100%. This vast improvement occurred between October 2010 and May 2011. Improvement is attributed to standardizing the collection of self-reported language data from patients during the registration process as part of the Hospital Quality Network requirements.