About HQI’s Sentinel Signal Detection System Report
HQI’s sentinel signal detection system automatically detects abnormal changes (i.e., signals) in the incidence of diagnosis categories from hospital encounter records in the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform (HQIP). Every quarter, HQI aggregates these signals across reporting hospitals to provide a statewide perspective.
In Q4 2024 the following patient safety concerns signaled in the Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery:
Emergency Department (ED)
- Intestinal infections – EDs signaled an increase in visits related to viral infections affecting the intestines. This trend highlights the need for close public health department partnerships to manage foodborne outbreaks.
- Nausea and vomiting – Nausea and vomiting cases signaled, potentially linked to the increase in gastrointestinal viruses.
- Pneumonia – Unspecified pneumonia drove ED encounters, raising concerns about community-acquired infections and gaps in vaccination adherence among high-risk populations.
Ambulatory Surgery
- Z Codes Utilization – Coding for acquired absence of organs signaled, indicating the increasing trend of using z codes for capturing a patient’s surgical history.
HQIP provides hospital leaders with the capability to review the latest signals for their organization each quarter. In this report, these signals are aggregated across reporting hospitals and provided as counts representing a statewide signal.
As an example, consider these results for the ICD-10 category Z20:
The ICD-10 category represents all ICD-10 codes that begin with these three characters.
The Positive column gives the number of reporting hospitals that had a statistically significant increase in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category for this quarter (i.e., the count of positive signals).
The Negative column gives the number of reporting hospitals that had a statistically significant decrease in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category for this quarter (i.e., the count of negative signals).
The Neutral column gives the number of reporting hospitals that did not see a statistically significant change in the count of codes in this ICD-10 category this quarter.
The Net Signal Value provided is the absolute difference between the number of Positive and Negative signals. The absolute difference is the difference between the two with a positive sign; a Positive Signal count of 20 and a Negative Signal count of 12 would lead to a Net Signal Value of 8 (as would a Positive Signal count of 12 and a Negative Signal count of 20).
The Description gives the text overview associated with this ICD-10 category.
The # category provides a bar chart with the quarterly counts of ICD-10 codes within this category among reporting hospitals. Hovering over each bar with a mouse cursor will provide a tooltip with the quarterly counts.