Our partners at the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority have produced a short video — Knock Out the Flu — that explains why everyone should get the flu shot every year, and why it’s more important now than ever to help protect you and your loved ones. It’s a helpful resource to share with your patients and community. In […]
Every quarter, HQI receives a large volume of discharge records (as part of the Hospital Quality Improvement Platform) and safety reports (as part of the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization, or CHPSO) from hospitals. To make use of this timely data, we designed and implemented sentinel signal detection systems that automatically detect abnormal changes in the incidence of diagnosis codes and terms’ document frequencies (i.e., signals). Moving forward, when these systems detect sudden increases in disease incidence or document frequency, HQI/CHPSO staff will investigate and alert member hospitals of these emerging […]
Health care disparities, defined as variation in quality and safety of care by patient sociodemographic characteristics, have been a significant and persistent problem in American health care. While California hospitals are often at the forefront of the quest to achieve equitable health care, significant work remains.
HQI, in cooperation with the Patient Safety Movement Foundation and 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.
Use of HQI’s new Hospital Quality Improvement Platform — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform — has increased since the last quarter. The platform is free to all California Hospital Association (CHA) members.
National and global organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization acknowledge that suicide is a significant public health issue that has escalated in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased concerns around suicide due to a variety of issues ranging from social isolation to financial hardship. In order to raise awareness and help promote suicide prevention, the CHPSO and HQI hosted the first in a series of webinars on the topic. Given the heavy burden health care providers shouldered, even before the pandemic, combined with the added stressors of caring for patients in these unprecedent times, we chose to start the series on Sept. 10 — World Suicide Prevention Day., The webinar focused on some of our most vulnerable front-line workers – our nurses – as studies have shown the nurses have a greater risk for suicide then age and gender matched populations.
“Quality is not an act; it is a habit.” – Aristotle
As patient safety and quality improvement professionals, you understand those words better than most. The work you do isn’t defined by a sales metric or accomplishment of a task, but rather by incremental improvement — your journey from providing good patient care to great patient care.
Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders continue to be the most common complication of childbirth. HQI’s Perinatal Mental Health (PMH) Learning Community seeks to strengthen hospital approaches to perinatal mental health through specially tailored learning and peer-exchange opportunities, which include webinars, group office hours, individual coaching, and online training and educational resources. These are all available to California hospitals free of charge, courtesy of a grant from the California Health Care Foundation.
One of the most popular educational offerings available to CHPSO members are the regularly scheduled Safe Table forums. Offered about two dozen times per year, these meetings are focused on safety and quality improvement topics, each with a specific clinical focus. As a members-only patient safety activity, these confidential forums occur within each participant’s patient safety evaluation system and provide a safe space in which to explore systematic concerns or issues and share lessons […]
Following up on our previous work on County-Level Relationships Between Risk Factors for Severe COVID-19 and Deaths, we applied similar methods to hospital-level data to explore the relationship between the prevalence of several hospital-level risk factors for severe COVID-19 and corresponding COVID-19 hospitalization rates at those hospitals. We used historical hospital inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery discharge records for California hospitals to estimate the patient population prevalence of several potential risk factors for developing severe COVID-19. In addition to the risk factors included in the prior analysis, we also included race/ethnicity in these analyses, though patient gender was excluded.