Week 4_5/13/2019
Week 4
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Interpreting Performance Improvement Measures and Benchmarking As a healthcare administrator/manager, it is in your best interest to help the facility you serve to move in the direction charted in the National Quality Strategy (Joshi et al., 2014). Organizations that fail to meet set standards are known to face sanctions and sometimes required to close shop. In consideration of this, you will want to ensure that the facility you manage is adopting a culture of quality that puts its patients at the center of healthcare delivery. You will want to do this by making sure that your facility provides quality patient care, while also keeping the facility’s bottom-line healthy.
To ensure you are moving in the right direction, you must measure and monitor key quality improvement indicators that are reflective of how your facility is doing not only internally (hospital acquired infections, falls, etc.), but also externally (benchmarking with other hospitals). To do this effectively, you must ensure that the score upon which your facility is being evaluated is fair. In other words, you want to
make sure that you are comparing apples to apples and not otherwise.
For example, it can be difficult making comparisons among different patient populations. In some cases, one facility may be seeing predominantly underserved population compared to other facilities in its comparison pool. Understanding these nuances and knowing how to mitigate their effects will go a long way in helping you and your facility succeed in your quest for improved patient safety. Figure 5 presents an interesting frame to assess varying cultural factors that can impact quality improvement measures across facilities (Bethell, Carter, Latzke, & Gowen, 2003). Attaining competency in this area is the focus of this week’s learning.
Figure 5: Assessing Differences in Healthcare Quality Across Culturally Diverse Populations
To help you get to where you need to be at the end of the week, you will be reading an interesting article that sheds light on the importance of knowing how to interpret scores from measures being monitored. Specifically, you will learn about the application of standards, means, norms, and benchmarks for performance measurement. Although the content of this week’s article is on mental health, the concept is the same for other areas of healthcare.
Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.
Reference:
Bethell, C., Carter, K., Latzke, B., & Gowen, K. (2003). Measuring and interpreting health care quality across culturally-diverse populations: A focus on consumer- reported indicators of health care quality. Portland: Foundation for Accountability.
Joshi, M. S., Ransom, E. R., Nash, D. B., and Ransom, S. B. (2014). The healthcare quality book: Vision, strategy, and tools. In K. D. Acquaviva & J. E. Johnson (Eds.), The quality improvement landscape (pp. 470-474). Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press.
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Books and Resources for this Week
Ballard, D. J., Graca, B., Hopkins, R. S., and Nicewander, D. (2014). Variation in medical practice and implications for quality. In M. S. Joshi...
Link
Herman, R. C., & Provost, S. (2003). Best practices: Interpreting measurement data for quality improvement: Standards, means, norms, and benchmarks...
Link
The Leapfrog Group (2018). Hospital ratings and reports.
Link
Week 4 - Assignment: Interpret Performance Measures
You have just been appointed as the administrator of a large managed healthcare organization with multiple facilities in your state, including facilities in city X and Y (table below). A task your office is charged with is to reimburse facilities based on how they perform on a set of healthcare quality measures.
Based on the information provided below, what considerations will you make in your decision-making process? To complete this assignment, prepare a PowerPoint presentation that highlights whether or not these two facilities (A and B) should be treated equally when conducting your assessment. If any, what are the implications of treating these facilities as equals for the purpose of comparison? Also, address the techniques you will use to ensure these facilities are assessed fairly.
Measures Facility A Facility B
1 Population
characteristics
City X: Mostly people
with high economic
status and those with
more than high school
education
City Y: Mostly p
with low econom
status, minoritie
high school or le
education
2 Population served All ages
Mostly older adu
and people with
disabilities and
chronic conditio
3 Staff to patient
ratio 1:4 1:8
4 Required Required
Physician and
nurses continuing
education
5
Average number of
hours staff work
per week
50 hours 60 hours
Length: 8-10 slides (excluding title slide and references slide)
References: Include a minimum of 3-5 peer-reviewed, scholarly resources referenced on a separate slide at the end of your presentation.
Your assignment should reflect scholarly academic writing, current APA standards,