Quality Quarterly

More than 190,000 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in California as of June 2020, resulting in over 5,600 deaths. Several potential risk factors for developing severe COVID-19 have been identified, including older age and various underlying medical conditions. HQI estimated the relationships between county-wide prevalence of several of these risk factors and COVID-19-related deaths/death rates in California counties using estimates of prevalence from historical statewide hospital  inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery discharge records. 

The Hospital Quality Improvement Platform has several new reports that will soon be available. 

The CHPSO 2019 Annual Report was released on May 13, 2020. This report, which covers the period of January 1–December 31, 2020, focuses on CHPSO’s year in review with highlights for 2020. The report is available online on the CHPSO website. 

This year, as part of the CHPSO annual report we provided feedback on the quality of the data submitted to CHPSO. This is part of a larger effort to improve our ability to develop our signal detection methods and other advanced analytic capacities in the CHPSO database. In the Data Quality section of the CHPSO annual report we provided definitions of various data fields, the rational for submitting certain fields to the Patient Safety Organization (PSO), along with the breakdown of the frequency of null fields for specific data elements. 

In our previous newsletter, we discussed CHPSO’s new “No Nulls” initiative to improve data quality and how member organizations can help in the effort. This article will review the data pipeline involved in the process, touch on some of the challenges and successes we’ve observed in the effort so far, and suggest ways we can work together in a two-pronged approach to improve end-to-end data quality.  The local event reporting system, which is a large component of the Patient Safety Evaluation System (PSES), is often considered to be the starting point of the patient safety data pipeline. A PSES is used to collect, analyze, and manage data for reporting to a Patient Safety Organization (PSO). However, this confidential Patient Safety Work Product (PSWP) data maintained in the PSES comes from several sources. Some of the data are sourced from a hospital’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, and some from patient safety risk analyses and event audits/reviews. Physically, the resulting data bundle usually ends up in an automated event recording system from a variety of vendor supported systems. Each member’s set up is unique and understanding the components and data flow housed within your specific hospital or health care system is critical in understanding where data might slip through the cracks and end up Null. 

As national leaders in the patient safety arena, HQI and its affiliate, Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization (CHPSO) are continually pursuing efforts to eliminate patient harm. We are always looking for new and innovative methods and partners and viewing patient safety issues through different lenses has always been an HQI/CHPSO attribute. 

Due to increased hospital workload and delays in data reporting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, HQI is delaying the release of updated Quality Transparency Dashboards until the third quarter of 2020.

CHPSO, a division of HQI, has changed its name to the Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization. The change, which took effect Jan. 29, was made in order to better reflect the organization’s membership. The organization remains dedicated to eliminating preventable harm and improving the quality of health care delivery in hospitals. 

Sarah A. Bajorek, PharmD, BCACP Mithu Molla, MD, MBA UC Davis Health   The University of California Davis Medical Center is a tertiary, 627-bed urban academic medical center that provides care to the Sacramento and northern California region. With a growing awareness of sentinel safety events related to medication errors, an internal assessment in 2015 gave us greater […]

Dr. Christine Braid
Bita Farhadpour, MBA 
Dignity Health Medical Group

Dignity Health has a robust virtual care program, which was started in 2008.  However, we have seen an explosion in virtual activity since the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020. The teamwork and dedication of our clinicians, leadership, and staff allowed us to meet the needs of our patients amid COVID-19. One of our long-term goals was implementing convenient virtual visits for all 200+ Dignity Health Medical Foundation clinics. Fast-forward to March 2020 and COVID-19 skyrocketed that goal into a reality much quicker than originally anticipated.