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. Simply put, there is no quality and safety without equity. While California hospitals and hospital systems have often been at the forefront of the quest to achieve health equity, significant work remains to be done.
HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART®, a partnership with BETA Healthcare Group and Inland Empire Health Plan Hospital Pay-for-Performance Program, will expand from 24 to 32 hospitals next year.
In November, HQI- and CHPSO-member hospitals enjoyed an excellent webinar on managing in-house cardiac arrest, and The Joint Commission’s focus on hospital care and monitoring processes.
Next month, and then again in November, we’ll gather in Long Beach and Napa, respectively for the HQI Annual Conference. After a two-year break, it will be a welcome opportunity to connect and re-connect with peers and experts and tap into patient safety excellence, while zeroing in on zero-harm care.
In case you missed it, CHPSO recently released its 2021 Annual Report.
The report details our activities and provides a look at CHPSO’s most significant work on your behalf.
HQI Cares: Implementing BETA HEART, HQI’s program to help hospitals develop reliable, sustainable cultures of patient safety and systems of care for the caregivers, is progressing well in the inaugural cohort of 24 hospitals.
Hospital enrollment is now open for 2023. If you’d like to discuss the program’s benefits and the potential enrollment of your hospital in the new 2023 cohort, contact Boris Kalanj, HQI’s director of programs, at bkalanj@hqinstitute.org.
“Despite the fact that the vast majority of health care takes place in the outpatient, or ambulatory care, setting, efforts to improve safety have mostly focused on the inpatient setting.”1
This was the topic of discussion in August when CHPSO and HQI were privileged to share the arena with Anjana Sharma, MD, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco during a webinar on ambulatory patient safety. Dr. Sharma is a primary care physician and researcher in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, where she works passionately to understand the impact of patient engagement in health care and to identify strategies to improve quality and safety within the ambulatory/community setting.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic caused myriad adverse health conditions, both physical and mental. The physical effects of the virus included a range of symptoms including, but not limited to fever, cough, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022).
Use of HQI’s updated Hospital Quality Improvement Platform (HQIP) — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform — continues to increase as more hospitals complete their contract reviews.
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, and over 80 total measures on the data tab.