Quality Quarterly

Updated Quality Transparency Dashboards Released for Third Quarter of 2020

HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and the California Hospital Association (CHA), creates and distributes quarterly dashboards of publicly available quality data for each CHA acute care member hospital. These model dashboards currently provide information on eight measures:   

Five outcome measures   

  • Central line-associated blood stream infection (CLABSI) 
  • Colon surgical site infection (Colon SSI) 
  • Nulliparous, term, singleton, vertex Cesarean birth rate (NTSV) 
  • In-hospital sepsis mortality rate  
  • Hospital-wide all-cause 30-day unplanned readmission rate (new for the 2020 third quarter) 

Three program status measures   

  • Maternity safety program   
  • Sepsis protocol   
  • Respiratory monitoring program  

Consumer-level explanations of each measure are provided. Hospitals may also add optional comments about performance and initiatives at that hospital. In response to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services  dropping  potentially preventable venous thromboembolism (VTE-6 ) from its Quality Improvement Program Measures for Acute Care Hospitals for fiscal year 2021, HQI replaced the VTE-6 measure with the Hospital-wide All-Cause 30-day Unplanned Readmission Rate.  

Dashboards are emailed quarterly to hospital leaders and quality/patient safety teams for 340 acute care hospitals. Updated dashboards for 2020 third quarter were distributed on Aug. 24. HQI encourages each hospital to publish the information in the dashboard to its public-facing website to increase hospital quality transparency.    

Our goal is to have a Quality Transparency Dashboard (or its equivalent) published on every California hospital’s website. Currently, 270 (79.4%) hospitals have posted the dashboard or equivalent information, 63 (18.5%) hospitals are in progress to post, and seven (2.1%) hospitals are not engaged in the transparency effort.   

For more information about the Quality Transparency Dashboard initiative click here  or email HQIAnalytics@HQInstitute.org.