Newsroom & Reports

Enrollment continues for HQI’s new Hospital Quality Improvement Platform — a quality analytics system that consolidates disparate data sources into a single, statewide platform. The platform is free to all California Hospital Association (CHA) members.   

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:   

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.