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) patient safety reports. Every quarter, HQI aggregates these signals across reporting hospitals to provide a statewide perspective.
COVID-19 Cases Decline, Social and Other Issues Increase
In Q2 2024, the most notable signal was the reduction in COVID-19-related cases.
Rising health concerns this quarter include increases in sexually transmitted diseases, inhalant abuse disorder, heart conduction disorders (bundle branch blocks), lipidemia, and malignant neoplasms of the larynx.
Signals continue to indicate a growing presence of patients struggling with social issues, such as difficulties within their family environment.
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.